Finally, Yahoo! GeoCities, a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 and later acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, will be closing down on Oct. 26. The 15-year-old service, which offers surfers a space to set up their own, personalized homepage, was once a very popular platform before the launch of Google’s Blogger and open source content management platform WordPress.
GeoCities began in 1994 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California. In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as “Homesteaders”) the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods. Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of “community” were added soon after, helping foster rapid growth. Many people flock to GeoCities to host their homepages for free as during the late ’90s, hosting options cost a bomb.
It was so successful that search engine giant Yahoo! acquired the service in 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock. Unfortunately, the acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began to leave en masse in protest at the new terms of service put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities. In 2001, amidst speculation by analysts that GeoCities was not yet profitable (it having declared an $8 million loss for the final quarter of 1998), Yahoo! introduced a for-fee premium hosting service at GeoCities and crippled the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their monthly data transfer for webpage visitors.
On April 23, 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remain active. In late June 2009, Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: “GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009.”
“Beginning on 26 October 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online – but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests,” Yahoo said in a statement.
Rival services have claimed that they are seeing increased traffic thanks to Geocities’ closure. “We’ve seen traffic increase dramatically over the last month as web users discover content networking,” said Neil Stapley, founder of Dadooda.com.
GeoCities was once a successful service, attracting millions of users. However, after Yahoo’s acquisition and rivals joining in the competition, it was performing below par. As today’s web hosting subscriptions gets cheaper and affordable and the availably of resources on the web becomes bigger, Yahoo! GeoCities is no longer a favorable platform to host personalized homepages. Well, could Yahoo’s poor handling of GeoCities resulted in such a failure? Maybe…
Via Wikipedia