A dotcom, or dot-com, is a company that conducts business primarily through a website. A dotcom company embraces the Internet as the key component in its business. Dotcoms get their name from the URL or domain name that customers enter to visit a website. The .com at the end of the URL stands for commercial.

Why Did the Dotcom Bubble Burst? The dotcom bubble burst when capital began to dry up. In the years preceding the bubble, record-low interest rates, the adoption of the Internet, and interest in technology companies allowed capital to flow freely, especially to startup companies that had no track record of success.

Investors avidly trade dot-com stocks from internet startups, until the bubble burst in 2000. The mid-1990s saw a worldwide, unprecedented growth in the information technology and telecommunications sectors. The cost of sending and storing information declined sharply.

a company doing business mostly or solely on the internet.