Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service.
GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques.
There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.
One of the pioneers of web-hosting sites, GeoCities gave users personal publishing tools and created “neighborhoods” within its web platform for users to be able to create pages, add a picture, text, a guest book and a website counter. Long before MySpace, Geocities was known as a place where teenagers, college students, and eventually others could impose their own garish taste upon the rest of the world. Here is one Geocities homepage we found from 1996: In honor of GeoCities and all that it has given the Web, whoever can come up with the worst GeoCities homepage design of all time will get a TechCrunch T-shirt.
I created my first website on GeoCities 10+ years ago. How sad to see it go! I owe it all to them!
Yes, it is so sad why Yahoo can not milking money out of it
That was last web 1.0 to close. Good memories!
I remember fiddling around with geocities as a novice webmaster. It is one which opened my window to the web world. Sad to see it go away!
I created my first site way back in the day on GeoCities too. At the time it really didn’t have much competition, but with all the social networks and whatnot today, people aren’t looking to build their own crappy little pages.
Sad to see it go.
End of an era.
The users will probably go to freeservers.
My first site was actually on Angelfire (anyone remember them), but I do remember quickly moving over to Geocities - can’t remember the reason behind it though. I believe it was because of the neighborhoods - making it easier for others to find your site.
Angelfire was my first too! (It’s still online. Animated gifs and all.)
share the url, take us all back :))
because I’m still on angelfire…lol…it works for me. What worse? I started with them when I was on Webtv..now there’s a hoot!
thought geocities was more of a social site. throwing 11 million uniques away is a big loss. must have weak traffic value. will MyYahoo take its place?
You make this sound like a bad thing.
It IS a bad thing! I maintain 2 sites at Geocities and was in the process of revamping a 3rd site.
I certainly will not sit still at this lame attempt to pad bottom line numbers! And I will most certainly not pay for something that I was getting for free!
Where’s the outrage?????
I remember creating my first site in Tripod and Geocities (which I still have) back in early 90s. Thats how I got into web development. Now people just create a Facebook or Myspace page and call it a day. There is no good opportunity for beginners to actually learn how sites are made from scratch.
You mean to say late 90’s, right?
Ahem…
Website: yahoo.com
Location: Sunnyvale, California, United States
Founded: January 1, 1994
IPO: April 12, 1996
Ahem, yes. I guess in early 90s I was still making html pages for BBS. Its all a blur now! :p
All my knowledge behind HTML, Graphics Design and Internet Marketing started with one Geocities account back in 1999. Afterwards, I started accounts on Fortune City, Tripod, and Angelfire, only to return to Geocities.
In my opinion, it was Web 1.0’s social network for tech savvy people. This was true if you participated in Neighborhoods and Web Rings… Refreshing your page in the morning to see a couple of hundred new hits on your hit counter. (Thanks to Bravenet).
Chrono Trigger fans probably seen my sites back in the day. Ah, the memories… I want to retain my vanity url… How many people still have there Yahoo Geocities accounts? Can you remember your login / password?
Looks like people are going to have to start making free websites on http://webstarts.com
Um, no
No thanks, dude, it’s 2009 here.
Didn’t even look at the link did you?
If he had looked at the link, he would see that it is in fact very 2009: almost exactly like Geocities, but with gradients and rounded corners.
Free Webstarts… it’s a scam, i read a bout it on some blog…
Well… being the founder of WebStarts I deffinately take offense to you saying my company and product is a scam.
We have thousands of customers who would argue against you.
See customer testimonials here
http://webstarts.com/testimonials.php
See sites bult with WebStart here
http://webstarts.com/live-domains.php
Any questions? You can call our 800 number and talk to me personally. The number is right on the right on the homepage.
Next time check your facts! Call me.
Scam or not, definitely subpar… especially with the ‘founder’ posting misspellings and links to testimonials here!
I feel old.
My nephew, who is 14 and codes circles around me, asked “what was GeoCities”.
Anyone remember Homestead? They were always better IMO.
I’m waiting to hear the same thing about Tripod…
You mean Angelfire?
I heard that tripod may be heading to the deadpool.
I had pages on each of them.
Geez, I feel ancient.
Um, Homestead is still around. In fact, my website is a hosted by Homestead, though, granted, I haven’t updated it in ages due to my computer not being able to handle the offline tool set. I’m going to start again when I set up my new computer.
http://www.webs.com is an up and coming place to have a web site FREE
Holy crap… I forgot about Homestead… yes yes, I also did have a Homestead account… It was cool but I prefered having FTP access on Geocities, lol!!!
Yeah, It’s really too bad to see it go but then again, Yahoo is a struggling company and they need every bit of savings that can get to stay afloat.
No big loss for Yahoo.
They bought this during the bubble with overpriced stock.
Quoting Crunchbase
” Acquired: January 28, 1999 by Yahoo! for $2.87B in Cash”
“In a move to strengthen its position as the leading Web portal, Yahoo today announced that it has signed an agreement to acquire GeoCities, a maker of personal publishing tools and Web-based communities, in a stock deal worth about $3.56 billion and $1 billion in options. ”
CNET January 28, 1999
Yeah, TC got it wrong. Nobody paid cash for anything during dotcom boom. It was all stock!
Wow. WTF.
There goes a big chunk of Internets history.
Good riddance.
Worst GeoCities design of all time: http://www.geocities.com/mister_s_13/
I wish this counted as a Geocities, because it’s the best worst:
http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbsite/
Haha, I love the site visits counter at the bottom.
How much acid was the person on who made that “Littlest Elf” website anyway?
So the point is that, we have lost a free web hosting service. Not A Good News.
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Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!
My sentiments exactly.
Although, my reaction was bit more N-n-no. No. Noooooooooo (break for oxygen) oooooooooooooo.
Someday we’ll see Newscorp making the same announcement about MySpace.
Bad strategy by Yahoo. See microsoft officelive..
They give free domain, free very good web site design and lots of extra..
Can’t yahoo create something like or better than officelive website creator?
Sigh..
Nope, nit as long as Jerry Yang insists on being there
Jerry Yang isn’t there anymore.
Um, yea he is. Just not as the CEO dipshit.
Are you stupid? J Yang is still @ Yahoo.
MS’s free domain etc. are for the first year…. check out how much it costs after that…. Neways do you have a domain there given that it is free smart ass
‘…as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened. ‘
I have a baaaaad feeling about this Obi-wan!
Never heard of it… Sounds like a mapping program.
You’re likely new to the web.
Sad to see this piece of Internet history shutting down.
I built my first website on Geocities back in 1996/1997…
I gave birth to the Faggot Bible on geocities, way back in ‘97! It was very bloody; they had to do a c-section. The whole neighborhood was offline until I recovered.
I remember creating my site on Geocities. I even took a class in 8th grade that dedicated like 2 weeks to creating a site on Geocities. I credit Geocities with teaching me HTML and CSS. After seeing how awful Geocities designs were I made it my missions.
Not a big deal. When was the last time anybody here actually visited a Geocities website?
I have.
Either the Internet is young or I’m old at 22. My first site was at Geocities at 1996/1997. With tags all over the place and no warnings about seizures.
*With flash tags all over the place.
Perhaps you meant blink
I signed up when it was called “Beverly Hills Internet”! That’s almost a year before it was renamed or acquired by GeoCities. My how time flies!
Someone should compile a list of all the money Yahoo has spent buying companies that it ultimately shutters, and how much money they lost on each transaction. That would be interesting.
Broadcast.com: $5.7 billion? (WTF???)
Geocities.com: $2.9 billion?
I’m coming up blank at the moment
Jumpcut, AdInterax, Bix, Maven, Blue Lithium, Right Media…and dozens more
All bullshit
I see bluelithium listed when some ads load most all the time!
It’s a shame really. There’s so many quality content sites on geocities that have terrible designs. I fear that information will be lost.
Thank goodness for the internet archive.
worst: http://web.archive.org/web/199.....ities.com/
Thank Christ… that shits been polluting the internet for way to long.
Nominations for worst GeoCities site ever:
http://www.geocities.com/soho/1469/flw.html
http://www.iowalegionriders.org/
http://www.geocities.com/doowopp21/
http://www.geocities.com/awesometabs/
http://www.geocities.com/takoda_magick/
http://www.geocities.com/hankmcintyre/
http://www.geocities.com/ajsblue/
http://www.geocities.com/skashow/
Nevermind. Misunderstood the directive.
The Frank Lloyd Wright site wasn’t that bad and I learned from it.
Boy … do I feel old!!
This one is nice http://www.geocities.com/doowopp21/
Ahh..Geocities. Got my feet wet in web design there. I think I still remember my old address too, back when they were horrendously long with actual city names and a 4 digit number to them.
The worst Geocities site of all time had to be Web Tek Rocks. It’s not actually found on GC anymore but here’s the URL:
http://webtekrocks.com/
That site is not for the faint of heart designer or the seizure-prone.
Oh man! WebTekRocks rocks for sure! It is the best of the worst. It is a legend - since Jan 20 1997.
this is bombastic :)))
“our experteze” indeed!
My nomination:
http://ar.geocities.com/coventgardencattery/
Crushed purple velvet, gold-framed Persian, animated @email gif… refined, but not with style.
I also like
http://geocities.com/lysh19/
http://www.geocities.com/mike_priller125/
Say goodbye to one the worst acquisitions in business history!
http://www.geocities.com/fastmanfunnay/
My entry for the ugliest GeoCities website:
http://www.geocities.com/Silic.....izon/5384/
It’s so ugly and crazy I actually bookmarked this a couple years back when I first came across it.
he has a poll asking to rate his website.
78% rate it:
“worse than a pigeon on acid.”
There were so many of these. FortuneCity, Angelfire, Tripod, theGlobe, GeoCities. In the world of “connectivity” they ossified as old-style Web 1.0 personal web pages. Yahoo should have helped GeoCities move with the times. But given that they didn’t, killing it now is smart.
I’ve been away from Geocities and now I hear about this. Tripod Lycos might still have a free site available, then again…
I built my first website on Geocites, long before the Yahoo Geocities merge. I have never received an email about edit your site or it’ll be deleted after 30 days of inactivity. Had it since 1997, and it led me to build a site for a local club. That grew massive that I ended up letting someone else take over for good.
First website started in 1997: http://geocities.com/fischma01
Latest one was started in 2001 on Geocities, moved to Trainweb.org in 2005 & redesigned, recently was redesigned again by new webmaster couple months ago: http://trainweb.org/jvmrra
In my view, this is a mistake. While Geocities is not the $2.7 billion that Yahoo paid for it, 11.5 million unique visitors a month in ad revenue seems to me to be worth keeping alive just for the ad revenue.
This could be a boon for web sites like HubPages.Com, Ning, and Mahalo.
Visitors who don’t buy services and products or click on ads are useless, it doesn’t matter if there are a billion hits an hour, if these visitors just look-see and go on their way then they just waste the short bandwidth and the sites are shut off for a period.
Hi — I worked for GeoCities. To me, GeoCities really expired when Yahoo acquired it. On a purely surface level, yeah, GeoCities was a just free web hosting service with a whole lot of ugly pages (myspace, anyone??). But it was already way more than that when Yahoo acquired it. It really GOT the spirit of online community and was exploring ways to innovate further — which is what made it so awesome to work there (we focused on people and usability). It pioneered everything we now call social media/networking from blogging to category clouds to tweeting, etc.
Liza, of course it did, it’s fun to watch how a bunch of dropouts is reinventing the wheel once again.
Thank you for your great job.
Other free hosts had more space, less irritating advertising, and FTP transfer. That’s why I never bothered to use GeoCities.
I agree, I got on Geocities right when it was transitioning away from having meaningful neighborhoods. I was disappointed but used it anyway, for a couple of years, before switching to cheap web hosting at Doteasy and then retiring my personal websites in favor of blogs.
This is a pretty awesome layout.
http://br.geocities.com/vfdesigner/
OMG! LOL
All gifs! awesome
Good idea. Geocities was always useless. A complete waste of money on yahoo’s part. Recession over http://iamned.com/blog/ the stock market keeps surging
Geocities may be old, but I’m pretty sure it still has more visitors than Google Sites for instance. The latter will probably get deathpooled too at some point I guess. Geocities at least has ads on it, Google Sites doesn’t, heh.
Okay, and here’s my entry: http://www.geocities.com/a1pyro/
That’s a classic!
…damn we’ll miss those weird animated gifs
I think I speak for many, many people when I say “Geocities wasn’t already dead?”
These guys are morons - before MySpace and Facebook there was geocities. Yahoo has the lead touch, whatever gold they touch turn into lead. I didn’t even know they own it…
Wow, back in highschool a friend and I had a competition of who could build the best website and we both used geocities for the hosting. Can’t believe it’s closing down though, 11.5 million uniques is still serious traffic but I guess yahoo is hoping that the amount of paid upgrades to their hosting will surpass the revenue from geocities ads. I think this is a dumb idea. With the economy nowadays geocities users will probably just switch to another free host.
D**n skippy about THAT!!!
This story reminded me that still had a Geocities site. Which is, of course, ridiculous: http://www.geocities.com/mvops.....tball.html
I knew I made the right choice in 1997 when I chose to make a page on Tripod instead of Geocities.
http://www.tripod.lycos.com/
$2.7 billion of cash in drain..
Y! lost it..
I had completely forgotten about GeoCities. I can honestly say I don’t think I ever visited one of the sites until today
Good riddance
yahoo is doing working hard but it seems that they will take time in rising again.
Ahh… GeoCities.
I thought it was deadpooled a long time ago!
But, like many… it was my first web site. Unfortunately, I don’t have the address anymore.
What would be interesting, is to see how many web designers got their start on GeoCities, show their first web site and then see where they are today.
Hmmm…
Hideous Geocities sites:
http://www.geocities.com/paris.....pril1.html
http://www.geocities.com/stonehedgefarms/
turn your speakers down for this one:
http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/6295/
and here’s the jackpot:
http://www.geocities.com/lionscave1/?200923
I can’t take any more.. but y’all enjoy!
My entry will hurt your eyes:
http://br.geocities.com/vfdesigner/criacao.htm
I see, that’s a sub-page of a site I already nominated!
One of the contributing reason might just be that access to Geocities from Turkey was banned for almost last 2 years. with a population of 70M, Turkey must be capable of generating hundreds of thousands visits, and Geocities has been devoid of that possibility because of just some politics.
Just in case you may wonder, Turkey’s a great land with great people , however, it’s got the worst government in the world because they just forbid whichever comes against them and several sites in Geocities have been the reason for this.
Awww man! I hosted some of my very first websites there 15 years ago! They were god-awful beyond belief but it’s not the point!
So come on then, those of us old enough to have had GeoCities websites, who will be brave enough to show your sins??
I’ll start with one I cam still find - started in about 1994, abandoned a few years later: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/Downs/4455/
Frames, midi files autoplaying, animated GIFs, pop-ups, scrolling text, gaudy backgrounds, it had it all!
Seriously, can anyone claim a worst GeoCities site than that?
Pete
Oh my, that *is* bad.
Haha, good times.
http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Stadium/