Gallery

The ten biggest dotcom disasters

Posted on 26 Oct 2006 at 16:49

8 Sportal.com (Mk1)

With £50 million in start-up investment, things kicked off brightly for sports news site Sportal. Contracts to build sites for Juventus, Real Madrid and Euro 2000 led to a stream of traffic, and Sportal boss Rob Hersov also secured potentially priceless broadband and wireless rights for heavyweight clubs, from Madrid to Milan. Hersov believes that had he sat on those rights and bided his time, his Sportal would now be a billion-dollar player. Instead, he found himself forced into a race against time to hit profits before the bubble burst. He failed, and in November 2001 sold the company - once valued at £247 million - for £1, plus a few thousand for the technology, to UKBetting. Hersov's presumably sick as a parrot.

9 TheStreet.co.uk

The UK arm of the US-based financial news site burned brightly, if briefly, on the basis that the web would become the hubcap of wheeler dealing for the masses. But things hardly began well when the editor-in-chief Martin Baker left less than three months after the website's launch, and a lack of focus soon became apparent. Then there was the name - surely thecity.co.uk would have been more appropriate on this side of the pond?

It burned its way through £10 million between February and November 2000, which is good going for a site offering financial advice. The URL now leads to a page offering a "man with a van" in London, who is presumably better at delivering the goods than the address's previous tenants.

10 Webvan

In the biggest case of over-expansion since Mr Creosote's waistline, Webvan tried to take on America's supermarket giants overnight - despite having virtually no grocery experience, no infrastructure, no stores, delivery trucks or even a warehouse.

The idea of doing the weekly grocery shop online is a sound concept, but trying to start a company from scratch to take on WalMart et al was suicide.

Instead of sensibly partnering with one of the established giants, Webvan went on a manic supermarket sweep, spending $1 billion on high-tech warehouses, several million on a fleet of lorries and millions more on smaller rivals. Not surprisingly, in the first quarter of 2001, the company reported net losses of $217 million. It shut down that July.

Author: Stewart Mitchell