Last Updated on October 11, 2025 by Dave Farquhar
The eBay domain name was registered 30 years ago today, on August 4, 1995. But the site we know today as Ebay didn’t launch until almost month later, September 3, 1995, under a different name. Auctionweb, the original name for Ebay, was a side project. From these humble beginnings came one of the few survivors of the dotcom era.
What the Ebay name meant
The name eBay was always a little bit curious. Other early online auction sites had the word “auction” in the name, or at least something related to selling. I made my first few online auction purchases from a site called onsale.com. Sticking the letter “e” in front of whatever you were selling and registering a dotcom was a common tactic in the late 90s.
But a bay? That’s a body of water. Sure, bays are convenient places for ships to dock so the name kinda-sorta evokes trading, but it doesn’t seem like the best name for an auction site.
Originally it wasn’t. Originally Ebay stood for Echo Bay Technology Group, Pierre Omidyar’s other company. Auction Web was his side project. With echobay.com already taken by a gold mining company, he shortened it to Ebay.
From Auctionweb to Ebay
The story that Pierre Omidyar started Auction Web to help his finacee sell Pez dispensers is apocryphal. It was a hobby project over Labor Day weekend to help him make some extra money by selling stuff he didn’t need, like a broken laser pointer he sold for $14.83. By February, he was getting so much traffic his ISP informed him he was ineligible to use a $30 personal account, he’d have to upgrade to a business account priced at $250 per month. This proved fortuitious, as it drove Omidyar to start charging for use. He turned a $1,000 profit in his first month and a $2,500 profit his second. Within 14 months, the young site had hosted more than 200,000 auctions.
Auctionweb changed its name in September 1997. Short domain names gained more traffic because they were easier to type, and Omidyar already owned the ebay.com domain name. I remember winning some auctions in the fall of 1998 on Ebay, but I don’t remember anymore how I found out about the site.
The same year, Ebay received $6.7 million in venture capital funding. The most popular items on the site were Beanie Babies. Ebay had a more user friendly interface than the official site for trading Beanie Babies, making it popular with Beanie Baby collectors and toy collectors in general.
In September 1998, Ebay held its IPO at $18 per share, reaching $53 per share in its first day, making Omidyar and Jeffrey Skoll, Ebay’s first president, instant billionaires. Ebay’s first annual report listed the company’s dependence on the continued strength of the Beanie Baby market as a risk factor.
Surviving the dotcom bust
Even before the dotcom bust, Ebay was widely considered one of the four safest dotcom investments, alongside Amazon, AOL, and Yahoo. Ebay didn’t end up as big as Amazon, and it didn’t rise to the heights AOL did, but it didn’t fall like AOL or Yahoo either. In 2024, it had $10 billion in revenue and $1.98 billion in profits, against $5.16 billion in equity and $19.4 billion in total assets. It employed 11,500 people.
In 2003, Fortune listed Ebay as the 8th fastest growing company. By 2006, it had cracked the Fortune 500, landing at number 458. Ebay’s growth paralleled the growth of the Internet, so Ebay lost its shine as the number of new Internet subscribers tailed off, bringing down the number of new Ebay users along with it. But its status as a dotcom survivor makes it a rare bird. It didn’t eclipse Microsoft in size like Amazon or Google did, but reaching the Fortune 500 and maintaining a position on it is an achievement not many other dotcoms attained.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.