The founders of iVillage.com must have felt pretty sparky after their appearance on 60 Minutes in March. Leslie Stahl featured the popular women's Web site as a bright shining example of burgeoning she-power on the Internet. After talking about women-oriented chat rooms and e-communities, coexecutives Candice Carpenter and Nancy Evans had to answer just one question about, you know, profit. Would they ever make one?

Dot-com investors and venture capitalists across the new economy could be heard sucking in short breaths of trepidation as they waited to see if the iVillagers would botch the answer. Not to worry, they soothed—traditionally many, many companies don't make money in the first few years. An impressed Stahl even pitched in, offering iVillage's one-time $130 stock price as proof of financial health, and a slow exhale of relief went breezing through the new economy.

Never mind that the Monday after the broadcast iVillage was trading around $20, where it had thumped down in a post-IPO freefall—it went as low as $9.50 after the stock market crashes in March and April. And while it's true that many businesses traditionally operate at a loss when they start out, it's also true that those companies traditionally aren't, like iVillage and other dot-coms, worth $600 million in public marketplaces like the Nasdaq.

While the women of iVillage persuaded Leslie Stahl to ignore the elephant of profit sitting in the room, money men on Wall Street had already begun speculating that this summer the profit elephant will go on a trunk- blaring jungle rampage. Profits don't matter as long as investors don't care, true enough, but signs indicate that profit is making a comeback. And more than a few dot-coms will get trampled.