Info Intro The Cheap Names Craze

In the summer of 2001, a tidal wave hit the domain name world. It wasn’t a new technology or a major corporate acquisition—it was the launch of a single top-level domain: .info. Administered by Afilias, a consortium of domain registrars, .info was the first new generic top-level domain (gTLD) to be rolled out in a meaningful way since the original batch of .com, .net, and .org had become synonymous with the web itself. More importantly, .info was offered at an unprecedented price point, sometimes for as little as one dollar or even completely free during promotional periods. What followed was a feeding frenzy unlike anything the domain world had seen: a brief, chaotic gold rush that captured the imagination of speculators, marketers, and digital opportunists, and whose aftereffects are still felt in the way people view value on the internet.

The timing of .info’s release was critical to its reception. The dot-com bubble had burst just a year earlier, and while the wreckage of failed startups still littered the digital landscape, the allure of domain speculation hadn’t disappeared. If anything, it had evolved. Investors were more cautious, but the appetite for undervalued digital real estate was still potent. Afilias capitalized on this by making .info domains astonishingly accessible. While .com domains were still tightly held and often resold for thousands of dollars, .info names could be acquired for pocket change—or nothing at all if registrants acted quickly enough during special registrar promotions. GoDaddy and other major registrars led the charge, offering bulk discounts and giveaways that made acquiring domains feel less like a business transaction and more like a clearance sale.

Suddenly, everyone was a domainer. People who had never registered a domain before were now scooping up dozens or even hundreds of .info names, hoping to flip them for profit or hold them as long-term digital investments. Forums like DNForum and NamePros exploded with .info chatter. Threads detailed strategy: which names might have resale potential, how to spot valuable keywords, and which registrars were offering the best deals. Entrepreneurs registered city names, product types, industry terms, and every conceivable one-word .info they could get their hands on. People bought names like travel.info, cars.info, diet.info—hoping they’d hold similar cachet to their .com equivalents.

But while the sheer volume of registrations was staggering—.info hit one million registrations faster than any gTLD before it—quality was another story. Many names had little inherent value, and with the barrier to entry so low, the registry was flooded with speculative junk: long, hard-to-remember domains, strings of keywords, and trademark-infringing grabs that would later be taken down. The abundance of freebies also encouraged a degree of throwaway behavior; people registered names they had no intention of developing or reselling, simply because they could. The perceived value of a domain began to shift—no longer was a domain name inherently prestigious or meaningful just by virtue of being registered. It had to be memorable, useful, and, increasingly, developed into a real site to command interest.

For many, .info was a psychological test of digital valuation. Did a cheap domain name signal a good opportunity or inherent worthlessness? In the eyes of many mainstream businesses and users, .info was always second-tier. It never had the intuitive familiarity of .com, nor the perceived authority of .org or .net. Despite the massive early adoption, few major companies ever chose to build their primary web presence on a .info domain. It was seen as a playground for hobbyists and speculators, not for established brands.

That perception issue was compounded by SEO concerns. As Google and other search engines matured, there was growing suspicion—sometimes founded, sometimes not—that .info domains were favored by spammers and link farms. The low cost made them disposable, and bad actors exploited them in large volumes for black-hat schemes. By the mid-2000s, webmasters and SEO professionals began to steer clear of .info, fearing algorithmic penalties or association with low-quality content.

Still, there were exceptions. A few .info domains, especially those with premium keywords or clean reputations, were developed into legitimate content portals. Some informational sites embraced the .info branding as a strength—leaning into its implication of knowledge, facts, or education. But these were rare islands in a sea of speculation and abandonment. For every weather.info or science.info that saw real usage, there were thousands of forgotten domains parked on ad pages or simply left to expire.

Over time, the frenzy cooled. Registrants who had bulk-bought names realized that resale markets were thin, and holding costs—though low—still added up over the years. The .info domain remained cheap, but the sense of opportunity had faded. When ICANN launched its much larger new gTLD program in 2013, introducing extensions like .xyz, .club, and .ninja, the same pattern repeated—except this time, with even more fragmentation and saturation. By then, .info had lost its novelty, and its early speculative allure was largely relegated to domain history.

In retrospect, the .info craze of 2001 represents a pivotal moment in the democratization and commoditization of domain names. It proved that barriers to entry could be obliterated with price, but also that market value doesn’t scale linearly with accessibility. It exposed the limits of domain name speculation and revealed the importance of branding, memorability, and trust in the digital identity equation. While .info still exists today, with hundreds of thousands of registrations, its initial surge stands as a monument to the dot-com era’s last great land grab—a fleeting, frenzied moment when everyone thought the next big thing could be had for a dollar and a dream.

In the summer of 2001, a tidal wave hit the domain name world. It wasn’t a new technology or a major corporate acquisition—it was the launch of a single top-level domain: .info. Administered by Afilias, a consortium of domain registrars, .info was the first new generic top-level domain (gTLD) to be rolled out in a…