Farewell, GeoCities

In April, Yahoo announced that it was no longer accepting new registrations to GeoCities and that it would close the service on 26 October, almost eleven years after it had purchased it. That day has now come and Yahoo will be pulling the plug any minute now, at which point all free GeoCities accounts will be deleted. Yahoo is instead promoting Yahoo Web Hosting, a paid hosting solution that allows GeoCities users to retain their websites. The Internet Archive is working to archive as many GeoCities pages as possible before the service is shut down and has set up a webpage where you can check if your page has been archived and recommend it for the archive if it is not already included.

GeoCities, originally known as GeoPages, was started in 1995 by Beverly Hills Internet. The service allowed users to create websites for free which were organized into what BHI called “neighborhoods”, such as Hollywood, RodeoDrive or WallStreet, CapitolHill, Paris or SiliconValley. GeoCities went public in 1998, trading on the NASDAQ stock exchange, where it saw its stock value double on the first day of trading.

It was purchased by Yahoo in 1999, when GeoCities was the third most visited website, for $3.6 billion in stock. Yahoo originally updated the GeoCities’s terms of service to give it ownership over all content posted on GeoCities, but it later changed its policy due a backlash by users. It also removed the neighborhood system that GeoCities had since its beginning, instead allowing users to select a shorter vanity URL located at geocities.com/username. Yahoo also introduced premium accounts while downgrading the experience of free users. Premium users were given FTP access to their accounts, a feature that was previously available to everyone, as well as extra storage space.

Over ten years after it had purchased GeoCities, Yahoo announced on 23 April 2009 that it would be closing it on 26 October. GeoCities struggled to make a profit and recent years have been tough on the service. The popularization of social networks, the advent of cheap hosting and easy-to-install blogging software and an increase in web design standards have all made the service look outdated and have contributed to slipping visitor numbers. Still, the site has some sentimental value to many, myself included, whose first website was created and hosted on GeoCities. Its PageBuilder tool allowed you to build a website, albeit an ugly one compared to modern websites, without any knowledge of HTML and it provided free hosting at a time when hosting was otherwise expensive.