It is spring and the myriad internet companies that burst into bloom in the past few years are reborn.

Only a few months ago they were cranking up revenue, building brand and ignoring the bottom line. Now, the P-word is no longer "page views" or "promotional budget": it's "profitability".

On Wednesday, there was Amazon.com predicting record pro-forma operating profits for its US books, music and video business for the full year, and positive operating cash flow over the remaining three-quarters of this year.

That is not to say the online retailer - which has worn its loss-making status almost like a badge of honour - is in the black by ordinary accounting standards. It reported a first-quarter pro-forma loss of $122m. Go to the traditional bottom line - including charges for goodwill amortisation, Amazon's share of losses of companies it invested in, stock-based compensation, and merger, acquisition and investment-related costs - and the net loss is $308m.

EToys, the online retailer that has suffered a jarring drop in its share price since Christmas, has also seen the light. On Thursday it said its core domestic toy business was "well on its way" to achieving profitability in fiscal year 2002.

In the upbeat statement that accompanied the results (loss for the quarter: $36.6m before non-cash charges), Toby Lenk, chief executive, opined that it had "the DNA of profitability". Investors might recall there were about 25 years between scientists discovering the structure of DNA and being able to use it sensibly for genetic engineering.

It is, of course, churlish to criticise e-tailers and their like for focusing on profit. That is exactly what doubters of the internet stock boom have been asking them to do for the past 12 months. But it is interesting to observe the way internet companies are deftly reworking their strategies to accommodate Wall Street's rather more dour approach to loss-making newcomers.

The dotcom suffix itself was one of last year's quickest routes to stock market success. Michael Cooper, Orlin Dimitrov and Raghavendra Rau of Purdue University in Indiana actually studied the effect of adding a dotcom, producing a paper last summer entitled "A rose.com by any other name" (available from rau@mgmt.purdue.edu). They concluded there were abnormal returns of about 80 per cent in the 10 days surrounding the announcement that a company was to adopt the gilded suffix, and that the effect was relatively durable.

"A mere association with the internet seems enough to provide a firm with a large and permanent value increase," they said.

But the suffix that buoyed up the sector last year has proved a heavier burden in 2000.

According to figures prepared for the FT by Comm-Scan, the research group, shares in the 102 USlisted internet companies with a .com or .net suffix fell more than 50 per cent between the peak of the Nasdaq Composite Index on March 10 and Tuesday's close. The 350 internet companies without the suffix held up only marginally better.

At the bottom of the dotcom list, Resourcephoenix.com, which handles accounting operations and electronic business services for companies, has fallen more than 80 per cent since mid-March.

But Rau of Purdue says that confirms his team's early findings from this year: most dotcoms have at least held on to the value they created by adopting the suffix, relative to their peers in the same sector.

The rest of the anecdotal evidence for those bearing the dotcom badge is less positive. Although a surprising number of companies have added a dotcom suffix even as recently as this month - 11, according to Rau - there are the beginnings of a move away from the tag.

Some branding and naming agencies are advising clients not to adopt the suffix and there have been a couple of amputations. Info-Space.com, which provides commerce, information and communication infrastructure services, signalled the peak of the market on March 1 when it decided to drop the dotcom.

Chief executive officer Naveen Jain said then that InfoSpace was more than just an internet company. Coincidentally, it produced its quarterly results on Thursday - a pro-forma net profit of $1.9m.

Meanwhile, among existing dotcoms, only two - Barnesandnoble.com and Mapquest.com - are in positive territory since the March 10 Nasdaq peak.

The comparatively strong performance of Barnesandnoble.com, the online tracking stock for the bookstore of the same name, is interesting. Online US book sales are part of the area that Amazon - Barnes & Noble's big rival - now says is profitable; Barnesandnoble.com's modest outperformance of other internet stocks may also reflect a growing interest in stocks that appear to offer some combination of offline and online presence.

At the same time, the proportion of initial public offerings coming to the market with a dotcom suffix has dropped from 26 per cent in the whole of 1999, to 18.5 per cent so far this year, according to CommScan. That is still an extraordinary figure, but it is also an indication that the appetite for companies that signal themselves as pure internet investments may be falling away.

Interbrand, the international branding consultancy, has detected a falling off in enthusiasm for the .com suffix among its clients.

As a specific way of publicising a company's location, it is already anachronistic - most companies worth their salt have a web site that is easy to track down, simply by adding .com to the company name. If they do not, it is probably an indication that the corporate lawyers have not done enough to track down cybersquatters who beat the company to the relevant domain name.

As for indicating that the company has a stake in the online world, all but the smallest US corporations have some sort of internet or e-business strategy. In that respect, the suffix is probably no more useful a guide to potential investors than if, say, Dow Chemical signalled its use of telephones by calling itself Dow Chemical & Telecom.

"I just think it's one of those things - it's becoming redundant," says Martyn Straw, Interbrand's president. "But it's not exclusively to do with the recent rollercoaster on the Nasdaq - it's to do with maturing business strategies." andrew.hill@ft.com