In the face of dwindling profits, Yahoo! have made the move to close its personal web hosting site GeoCities later this year. 
GeoCities provided basic free hosting and was popular for users who wanted to create their own site dedicated to a particular interest of theirs. The beauty of GeoCities was that you could create a professional-looking page with little or no HTML knowledge.
Yahoo bought GeoCities for approximately £2.5bn back in 1999, at the height of the dotcom boom.
At its most popular, GeoCities held millions of active accounts, but its decline in popularity came with the growth of social networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook.
For now, existing GeoCities accounts will remain live but Yahoo! has noted that users should start looking for alternative hosting options, and have funily enough promoted the Yahoo! Web Hosting service.
Rupert Goodwins, editor of the ZDNet website, said the closure of GeoCities was the end of an era.
“I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.
“It was a fascinating experiment in the pre-industrial era of the internet, but after the initial exuberance on what the web could do, it turned out to be more complicated than just giving them free hosting.”
Source: BBC News
2 thoughts on “The End of an Era: Yahoo! to Close GeoCitites”
Geocities was the home of my first proper website.
It’s like the death of a distant relative or close family pet. :(
I know what you mean! It’s actually strangely emotional when these pioneering sites close down.