Happy Birthday, Baby! BabyNames.com Turns 30
Before Google, before Facebook, before Wikipedia, there was BabyNames.com. In 2026, we celebrate 30 years online. Three decades of naming babies, people, characters, pets, and more!
The Origin Story
In 1996, I was working as a software developer and had several personal projects I created, including a database that contained names and meanings that I had collected over the years. My daughter was three, I was a newly-single mother, and devouring this new tech platform called the Internet. I took my names database and put it online on my “personal web page” to learn how to code internet applications. Before I even registered the domain name, the traffic on my site started to explode and I realized that this was important content that the world wanted.
I remember sitting at my desk at my day job weighing whether I should register the domain name BabyNames.com. It was still available! At the time the fee to register a domain was $50 per year and you had to purchase a minimum of two years. Well, a hundred dollars was a lot for a newly-divorced, one-income, single mother. I remember cringing when I pushed that “PURCHASE” button, but it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Because it changed my life…and the life of my family.
A Family-Owned Business
Since I was still working full-time I needed help with the operations of the site, now that thousands of users were visiting daily. So I recruited the smartest women I knew to help with the website: my three sisters and my mom. Before it even became a business, we started creating content, moderating the community, and adding to the database. As people found us and our traffic increased month over month, exponentially. I remember emailing my mom saying “I can’t believe these numbers, it’s equal to the entire population of Utah!” When online advertising started providing revenue to the site, we realized this was a business and it launched my career in web development.
My mom, Peggy, was trained in early childhood development and contributed a very popular column called “Ask Grandma Maggie” about baby and childcare, which we published for many years. That column was her pride and joy…other than us, of course! We still republish her blog posts occasionally, as they are just as relevant today.
Passing the Torch
In the five year span from 2014 to 2019, we suffered a lot of loss in our family. Our mom, our dad, and sister Kate all passed of different types of cancer. We also lost Mallory’s husband who died unexpectedly. It was a dark time, but we had to carry on the business as we recovered from our grief. As the next generation became young adults, my daughter and her cousins started to contribute to the site in social media and content creation. In addition to family, we hire contractors as needed, but have kept it a tight-knit, lean, family operation.
Talking Head
As the founder and CEO of BabyNames.com, I became the de-facto names expert in the eyes of the media. Living in Los Angeles, I was invited to appear on news programs and radio shows and talk about my favorite subject: names! I gave several presentations for the American Name Society, and talked about the most popular names of the years on national news outlets like MSNBC, FOX, and CNN. I remember the year I went on CNN was 2001, and I was part of their “year in review” segment. If you remember, that was the year of 9/11. As I was sitting in the green room prior to the interview, in walked Johnny Cochran, O.J. Simpson’s infamous attorney who iconically stated, “If the glove doesn’t fit, you must acquit!” I definitely felt a little imposter syndrome, wondering “Why me? Why baby names?” I then realized that the public needed positive news to offset all the horrors of the last couple of months.
Black Lives Matter
It was June 2020, and we had just suffered three months of lockdown from Covid. Then came the horrific murder of George Floyd, which enraged the world. Most websites were posting a small statement on their home page stating “We support Black Lives Matter” but I wanted to do more than just put up a platitude. In one publication, I saw a list of all the names of black people who were murdered by law enforcement, and so I put that in a box on our home page with the headline “Each one of these names was somebody’s baby.” That seemed appropriate because it reminded people that they’re not just names, they are/were people. With families. With parents. You can still view our statement here.
The message must have universally resonated, because the next day I woke up and we had gone viral – to the point that our server couldn’t handle the tens of millions of people coming to the site. It was retweeted by celebrities, politicians, and Trevor Noah mentioned it on his show. The virality lasted about a week, and it was quite a roller coaster ride. We took the ad revenue we made during that week and donated it to six non-profit organizations that served the Black community.
It just shows that if you speak from the heart, you can touch a million hearts. I was proud that if anything in my lifetime made me temporarily famous, it was being an ally.
The Podcast
When my sister Mallory and I were kids, we would spend hours recording “shows” on the family cassette recorder. I would interview her, she would interview me, we would discuss pop culture and fight on mic. In 2018 I was finishing up another podcast and had an epiphany! I texted Mallory “Hey, do you want to do a baby names podcast?” and she replied “ya, why not.” The Baby Names Podcast now has over 100 episodes and we have the exact same dynamic that we rehearsed as kids, and brought it to our audience talking about all sorts of name subjects from celebrity baby names to name discrimination to the top baby names of the year. And although we’ve slowed down a bit, we will produce more episodes as we discover new, fascinating name subjects.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s hard work! Editing is a b!tch. But we found a whole new audience who appreciates our sisterly humor and the 30 years of experience we’ve acquired helping parents name their babies, authors name their characters, and people rename themselves.
But What about the Animals?
Some of you who listen to the podcast might know that I’m an animal lover. Ever since BabyNames.com became a household name, I wanted to open a sister site with pet names. I negotiated over 16 months to acquire the domain name PetNames.com, and when we finally got it I built a sister site based on our names database, but also including names exclusively used for pets. This was my second passion project, and I had so much fun creating lists of suggested names for cats, dogs, bunnies, snakes, horses and more.
A funny thing happened, though, at the beginning of integrating the two sites. I had forgotten to filter out the pet names from BabyNames.com, and I received one very mad email from an expecting parent saying, “How dare you suggest we name a baby Matzo Ball!” WHOOPS! I fixed that so fast, but I still crack up over that email.
AI and the Future of Informational Websites
In the past two years, the internet platform has gone through immense changes. AI has changed the landscape of content creators, basically scraping our content and then competing with us. Search engines are no longer providing a directory of websites in which to clickthrough and find answers – they’re just giving you the answers. Because of this, our traffic has suffered and we had to do some belt-tightening. But we will persevere! We are working with ChatGPT to develop our new AI features: AI Baby Names Generator, the Sibling Name Generator, and the fun Nickname Generator.
As we navigate this new online landscape, I will work harder and do exactly what I did when I started this website – keep learning new technologies! It’s my core strength, and I look forward to creating fun new features for our users.
We are now seeing the second generation of visitors coming to the site saying “My parents used BabyNames.com to name me, and now I’m using it to name my new baby,” and that right there makes it all worthwhile. Thank you for including us in one of the most precious and important parts of your lives. And thank you for coming back.
~ Jennifer
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