In fact, the habit of naming Internet companies is also a relatively interesting development history, which can be regarded as a portrayal of the history of the Internet.
When the first generation of pioneers of the Internet were born, their names were no different from other companies of the same era. They either wanted to highlight their "high-end" features in their names, or to strengthen some concepts. or symbol. This may be because newly founded Internet companies at that time generally attracted public attention, and they did not have to consider the issue of easy-to-remember names. For example, Google, Amazon, Jack Ma’s China Yellow Pages, Sina’s predecessor Sitong Lifang, Yinghaiwei, etc.
The Chinese Internet company that first used animals as mascots and names was Zhang Chaoyang’s Sohu, and he was imitating the popular Yahoo.
In 1994, Jerry Yang and Filo officially changed the name of the website to Yahoo. Yahoo comes from "Gulliver's Travels". It is regarded as the lowest and most savage animal in it, and it is completely impossible to train. Later, Yahoo was interpreted as "rude, unsophisticated, and vulgar", but Jerry Yang and Ferro liked this definition so much that they adopted it as the name of their startup company.
Yahoo went public two years later and became a star in the hearts of many Internet entrepreneurs. Zhang Chaoyang was no exception. His choice to found Sohu was also inspired by Yahoo. However, this Chinese name was not given by Zhang Chaoyang, but by Chen Jianfeng, the assistant to the president at the time, who changed the original "Sohu" to "Sohu".
Sohu can be said to be the beginning. Later, Chinese Internet companies generally liked to use animal cartoon images. In fact, it was after Tencent’s penguin unintentionally became a totem and symbol. Of course, this is not a blind pursuit. The core reason is that the competition among Internet startups has become increasingly fierce, and it is particularly important to have a name that is easier for netizens to remember.
So, compared with names that have good meaning but are not easy to remember, names with animals or plants are easy to remember and easy to spread, and sometimes the animals chosen are very consistent with the company's external image, which is also It's like killing two birds with one stone. In addition, in addition to names with animals, overlapping characters are also becoming more and more common in Internet companies, such as Didi, Momo, DingTalk, etc.