Xoom (the original)

» see xoom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

xoom.com launched in 1996 as a free homepage host. you signed up, got a url like home.xoom.com/yourname or members.xoom.com/yourname, uploaded html and gif files, and your page was on the internet. ad banners paid the bills. same business as geocities, tripod, angelfire, fortunecity, just smaller.

xoom never matched geocities for scale. geocities was the big one. tripod was second. xoom was third or fourth depending on who counted. but it was real and it had millions of pages. for late-90s teenagers building their first websites it was one of the names that came up in dropdown menus and "host your homepage" banners.

i did not personally have a xoom page. my first hosting attempts went to angelfire for the actual files and cjb.net for the cleaner url. but xoom was always around in the directories and on the classmate url trade lists.

~ the record ~

~ the bubble years ~

xoom went public in december 1998 in the middle of the dot-com run-up. the stock did well briefly because anything ending in.com did well in 1998. by the end of 1999 the company was burning cash but valued at over a billion dollars on paper. that was the kind of math that only made sense in 1999.

in march 2000 xoom merged into NBC Internet (NBCi) alongside snap.com. nbc paid in stock that was worth around 2.7 billion dollars at signing and a fraction of that by the end of the year. nbci was supposed to be nbc's answer to yahoo and aol. it was a pure dot-com bubble move: a tv network buying a portal so it could call itself a "convergence company."

the bubble popped. nbci's stock collapsed. by late 2000 nbc was looking for the exit from consumer internet. by april 2001 they had shut down xoom.com free hosting along with most other consumer products. the original xoom was effectively over within five years of launch.

~ the domain reuse ~

the xoom.com domain sat for a while after the shutdown, then got sold to a small money transfer startup in 2003. that company kept the name, built a remittance product on it, and eventually got acquired by paypal in 2015. modern xoom = paypal's international money transfer service. nothing to do with the original free homepage host.

this is one of the cleaner brand reuses in the dead-internet category. nobody who uses paypal xoom today knows there used to be a different xoom that hosted geocities-tier homepages. the old xoom is buried under the new one in search results.

~ the legacy ~

what dot-com bubble math looked like in fast-forward. xoom ipo'd in december 1998 at a billion-dollar valuation and was shut down by april 2001. less than three years from going public to dead. the shutdown was quiet because nobody outside its user base really cared by 2001.

the wayback footprint. archived xoom-hosted pages still exist at home.xoom.com/* and members.xoom.com/* urls in the internet archive. they are the same era as the worst geocities pages: animated gifs, midi music, "under construction" banners, hit counters that show 47 visits since 1998.

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