It was the year 2000 and eBay owned half.com came up with a novel way to capture the worlds press. They paid $100,000 and donated computers for the school in the Oregon town of Halfway in return for them changing their name to Half.com. The first dot com city in the world was born.
News coverage was everything expected, NBC news broadcast live from Half.com on 19th January 2000 and Half.com capture media attention around the world. It wasn’t until June 2000 that eBay finalised a deal to bring Half.com (the website not the town) into the eBay group of companies.
The Half.com name was only supposed to remain for a year, but the signs stayed for a lot longer until the dot com era was well established. One sign remains in the town museum but the other is now up for sale with a starting price of 99 cents. Of course there could be no other place to sell the sign than on the owner of Half.com – eBay!
