8 Successful Companies Who Changed Domain Names

#7 Facebook

World’s biggest online social networking site facebook.com was first dubbed as "thefacebook.com". Mark Zuckerburg, founder of Facebook, in February 2004, named the company after a physical face book, a Harvard publication that features students' names and photos to help them get acquainted. In an August 2005 site redesign, the team decided to simplify by dropping "the" from the name. This prompted the purchase of an already existing domain, "facebook.com," for a reported $200,000.

#6 PayPal

PayPal is a global e-commerce business allowing payments and money transfers to be made through the Internet.

PayPal was formerly named as X.com, and it was result of merger between Confinity, a company that enabled money transfers, and X.com, a company that helped solve the commerce-related challenges faced by businesses in the late '90s. Later the site X.com changed its domain name to PayPal during a company restructuring, which was named after a product Confinity had created — PayPal. The reason to this change in domain name could be for two reasons,  one, X being a universally recognizable symbol of a programming variable for developers, and two, surveys found X.com vague and potentially pornographic.

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