Yahoo shutters GeoCities — my eyeballs are grateful

April 23, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

Yahoo has announced that it plans to shut down free web-hosting service GeoCities, which it acquired for $3.6 billion a decade ago.

My first response to the news was, “Wait, GeoCities is still around?” The service has fallen far from its heyday in the late ’90s. I don’t know anyone with a GeoCities site anymore, and the name has become shorthand for ugly websites (featuring animated GIF files like the one below). Just in the last year, traffic to GeoCities sites has declined from 15.6 million to 11.7 million unique visitors, according to comScore. Meanwhile, struggling Yahoo isn’t in a position to support services that don’t pay off.

Yahoo is vague on the details, just saying that it is no longer accepting new registrations, and that more information about saving site data will be available this summer. Of course, there are many other site-building and hosting options out there, including blog software such as WordPress (which is what most of my friends use), and easy-to-use website makers like Weebly and Yola (formerly SynthaSite). But the true heir to GeoCities — in other words the place where teenagers now go to create ugly, eyeball-scarring home pages — is probably social networking site MySpace.

This move also eliminates Yahoo’s offerings in the free website arena, and it’s trying to direct users to its pay service, Yahoo Web Hosting. Weebly chief executive David Rusenko and Yola chief executive Vinny Lingham have both written blog posts weighing in, arguing that their business models (free website tools and hosting, then selling domain registration and premium services on top of that) are superior to ad-based GeoCities. Advertising, Rusenko writes, was “the start of the slow decline, when the early adopters all moved on and started looking for other services.”

(For what it’s worth, I built my personal website in Weebly and recently decided to pony up for a premium account.)

I’ve included a chart of comScore’s data on GeoCities’ traffic compared to Yola’s and Weebly’s below. Click on the thumbnail to see a larger image.

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Awesome eyeball photo for the "eyeball-scarring" article Anthony. But what religious sect wears these outfits? http://www.anthony-ha.com/
  • Bloggers.
  • asdf
    Your analysis is dead-on. GeoCities was the Internet's old septic tank, and MySpace has replaced it.
  • Peter Antypas
    ROFLMAO!!!! Spot on!!!!
  • Bruno
    Sometimes I do find a GeoCities page that is useful and informative, even it's loaded with animated GIFs and last updated 10 years ago.

    By comparison, I've never found *anything* remotely useful on Myspace.
  • Sometimes I find music I like on MySpace.
  • Bill Masterson
    geocites at one time was happening...yahoo let it wither and die a cruel death...geocities should have become myspace/wordpress and if it was independent it may have beceome much more valuable company
  • I suppose my eyeballs are grateful too that GeoCities is bringing the era of gaudy animated GIFs (except those on Myspace) to an end.

    What's kind of sad though about the situation is that there really is a lot of information that devoted and passionate people put on GeoCities pages that'll be lost now. In most of the comments and threads about this I find people like Bruno who refer to reference pages that just have never made the leap to another webhost -- probably because the vast majority today are blog-centric which isn't usually the best format for that kind of site.

    I can only concur with the Weebly & Yola execs about the advantages of the freemium model, charging for additional services and domain names. That's what Jimdo's been doing since we launched two years ago.

    For the few GeoCities users who may happen across this post, Jimdo's working on a rescue mission to help you migrate your sites and a 10% discount if you decide to buy our Pro package. Details here: http://jimdo.com/geocities
  • Douche
    Didn't synthasite replace their name with yola. You have them listed as separate in your chart.
  • Yes, I noted that in the article. the chart lists them separate because that's how comScore tracked them.
  • Shame on Yahoo!
    Yahoo! go to Hell!!!!
  • They should have adapted the brand with the times... there is a $100+ million plus acquisition down the tubes.