Geocities was at one time the largest web hosting service on the Internet, and was the third most visited website in existence in 1999. It allowed its users to create web pages for free. It hosted at least 38 million web pages. After holdings its IPO on August 10, 1998, Yahoo, then the most popular web site on the Internet, acquired Geocities on January 28, 1999 for $3.57 billion.
The problem Geocities solved
In November 1994, when Geocities launched as Beverly Hills Internet, it solved a problem. College students usually received accounts on their schools’ Unix servers included in their tuition. They could use these to host web pages. But when they graduated, they usually lost their accounts, and their pages.
Also, by 1994, it was clear that people who weren’t in college were going to want to use the web. If they wanted to create web pages, they needed a place to host them.
When you registered for Geocities, you chose a “city” appropriate for your content, such as “SiliconValley” for tech content and “Hollywood” for entertainment content. The URL they assigned you included the city you chose, plus a number, to resemble a street address. They never enforced the type of content you created.
Within 13 months, the site was getting 6 million page views a month, which was a huge number in 1995.
Of course the content was all over the place. But some pages that became prominent started out on Geocities. The long-running hardware enthusiast site Anandtech is a famous example that comes to mind.
IPO and the elusive search for revenue
Geocities held its IPO on August 10, 1998, opening at $17 per share. It quickly reached $100 per share, a price reflected in what Yahoo paid when it acquired Geocities in January 1999.
But you can’t turn a profit just giving stuff away, as fellow dotcom-era IPOs Cyberrebate and Red Hat learned. So Geocities started putting ads on the pages and offering paid premium services to get a revenue stream. Even still, at the point Yahoo acquired it, Geocities wasn’t profitable. In 2001, Yahoo introduced rate limiting, making the free and low-cost pages serve more slowly than paid premium pages. Yahoo bought it for the traffic, for similar reasons why it bought Broadcast.com. But making it profitable was still a problem in both instances.
Acquiring traffic and monetizing it are two different problems to solve. AI companies will relearn this lesson in time.
The end of Geocities
On April 23, 2009, Yahoo announced the end of life for Geocities in the United States and stopped accepting new registrations. The existing pages remained active until 2014, though they couldn’t be updated. Several projects to archive Geocities content sprung up, including one at the Internet Archive.
Most likely, few people born before the 1990s remember Geocities. But for those of us who were born in the 1990s or earlier, we frequently visited pages on Geocities, and as crude as it was, those low-fidelity self-published pages had a charm and a sincerity that somehow is missing in the slick pages of today.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.