In Memory of Geocities: 1994-2009

Yahoo! is pulling down Geocities on October 26, 2009. What does this mean to me. It means a lot. Geocities was the first place where i hosted my first site back in 2003. It’s been 6 years now and i feel nostalgic about it.

Something about Geocities:
GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.

In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, Geocities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28.

On April 23, 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would be closing GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remained active.[3] In late June 2009, Yahoo! updated the GeoCities home page to indicate: “GeoCities is closing on October 26, 2009.”

The domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually by 2008 according to a Compete.com study.

ComScore stated that the Geocities had 18.9 million unique visitors from the U.S. in March 2006. In March 2008 Geocities had 15.1 million unique U.S. visitors. In March 2009 Geocities had 11.5 million unique visitors, a 24% decline from March 2008

One thing i don’t understand about Yahoo! is that despite Geocities being such a huge success in its heyday, how come they could not find a single way to monetize it. It’s still the 195th most trafficked domain on Internet but still Yahoo! prefers closing it. I wonder what will they close next? Yahoo Messenger where i have my account since 2000 or Yahoo Mail.

RIP Geocities! You will be missed.