The dot.com era began around 1993 and grew to a fever pitch by the end of the 90s. Companies were gaining huge investments with low interest rates which allowed them to grow even faster. A quick look at broadcast.com, the internet company that broadcasted different events, will confirm this trend. When broadcast.com was sold to Yahoo, it sold for $5.7 billion. It had millions of users and the general thought at the time was that once a company was big enough, it could charge users for services later. The problem was, many websites never got around to charging for their services. Instead, many sold themselves off to larger companies making their owners millionaires and billionaires. Of the ones who didn’t, many of them folded completely; the others took years for them to regain their stock value (Amazon and eBay for example).