CYBERSPACE – So long, GeoCities, and thanks for all the fish. After 14 years of hosting everything from family travelogues to fan sites to recipes for homemade bombs — and, yes, a smattering of porn — Yahoo closed the venerable free website service Monday.“We have enjoyed hosting websites created by Yahoo users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built,” the company posted in an online FAQ. “However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. …[W]e’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests.”
In other words, the demise of the eclectic collection of Web-based ephemera is related to Yahoo’s bottom line. Ten years after acquiring GeoCities in an all-stock transaction valued at $3.5 billion, embattled Yahoo — itself now a target ripe for takeover, especially after Friday’s announcement that billionaire financier Carl Icahn will depart the board of directors — simply could not afford to continue exchanging bandwidth and server space for advertising real estate. The former GeoCities homepage now advertises Yahoo’s $4.99 monthly Web-hosting service instead.
“Yahoo continuously evaluates and prioritizes our products and services in alignment with business goals and our continued commitment to deliver the best consumer and advertiser experiences,” a company spokeswoman told the Los Angeles Times. GeoCities’ closing is “part of our ongoing effort to prioritize our portfolio of products and services in order to deliver the best products to consumers.”
Widely credited with offering the first free space for personal homepages, GeoCities was among the top five internet destinations in the late 1990s. The blogging phenomenon, MySpace, Facebook and other community oriented Web 2.0 properties — which Web historians see as a direct outgrowth of GeoCities’ initial concept — played a role in the service’s demise. With so many free resources now offered by bigger, more stable companies, GeoCities’ traffic — and therefore sustainable revenue — plummeted.
Yahoo signed the service’s death warrant in April with the announcement it no longer would accept new registrations and planned to close GeoCities in October. It advised homesteaders — the colloquial name for those whose sites it hosted in virtual neighborhoods like Hollywood and Silicon Valley — to back up their pages and move them elsewhere.
Yahoo does not plan to archive any of the millions of pages that resided on the service, although the non-profit Internet Archive project said it will preserve at least some of them.
“GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years,” a spokesman for the archive noted. “The Internet Archive is working over the next few months to ensure that our collection of GeoCities sites is as deep and thorough as possible.”
What the search engines will do about the sudden disappearance from the Web of massive amounts of content is anyone’s guess.
