Yahoo Closes Geocities - Geocities: Early Online Neighborhoods
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Geocities started life in 1995 as the brainchild of David Bohnett and John Rezner. Back then it was known as Beverly Hills Internet. With web sites featuring things like "home" pages, Bohnett and Rezner must have reasoned that a group of web sites, like a group of homes, can make up a community. But since there aren't separate geographical communities online, the founders created “cyber cities,” where pages with similar themes would be grouped. Then as now, it's not easy to make money on a free service, so all of the free web sites carried ads placed by the company.
Three years later, having changed its name to Geocities, the company revamped its web site to take advantage of the portal phenomenon then sweeping the Internet. It organized its information into GeoAvenues of content-specific groups. It also began featuring news from Reuters and added several other services. And it generously increased its users' free disk space allocation from 6 MB to 11 MB; those who wanted more could pay just under $5 per month for a whopping 25 MB.
In 1999, Yahoo took notice of Geocities in a big way, buying the company for somewhere between $2.9 billion and $4.7 billion, depending on who you ask. Hard as it may be to believe it today, at that time Geocities was the third most-visited site on the web, right behind AOL and Yahoo itself. In December 1998, it boasted 19 million unique visitors.
After buying Geocities, Yahoo made many changes to its structure. The most immediate change wasn't so much to the site as to the purchased company's personnel. Roughly two-thirds of Geocities' staff either quit or got laid off. Geocities' CEO Tom Evans became senior vice president of industry relations for Yahoo. The founders didn't fare as well; a press release written at the time noted that David Bohnett would “act as an outside community advisor to Yahoo.” The remaining 100 Geocities employees would move from working in Santa Monica, California, to either Yahoo's headquarters in Santa Clara or regional sales offices.
So what happened after that? Well, the dot-com bubble burst around 2000, followed by the generally depressed economy, followed by September 11, 2001...you get the idea. More to the point, by the time some kind of recovery set in, technology had advanced. Users had become somewhat more savvy, and programmers became better at building easy-to-use interfaces for online activities. But Geocities had not advanced with it.
The results became clear in the numbers. From its high of 19 million unique visitors, Geocities fell to 15.1 million unique visitors in March of 2008, and 11.5 million in March of this year. While that is still plenty of visitors, the trend is obvious.
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