GeoCities, later Yahoo! GeoCities, was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites free of charge, and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. GeoCities was started in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was named Beverly Hills Internet briefly before being renamed GeoCities. On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!, at which time it was reportedly the third-most-visited website on the World Wide Web.
At least 38 million pages, most written by users, were displayed by GeoCities before it was terminated. The GeoCities Japan version of the service lasted until March 31, 2019.
History
GeoCities began as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small web hosting and development company in southern California.
The company created its own web directory, organized thematically as six so-called "neighborhoods". The neighborhoods included "Colosseum", "Hollywood", "RodeoDrive", "SunsetStrip", "WallStreet", and "WestHollywood". In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods, with 2 MB of space provided at the time. During the registration process, new members chose which neighborhood they wanted to belong to. This neighborhood became part of the member's Web address along with a sequentially assigned "street address" number to make the URL unique (for example, <nowiki>"www.geocities.com/RodeoDrive/number"</nowiki>). Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon afterward, helping foster rapid growth. On July 5, 1995, GeoCities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill", "Paris", "SiliconValley", and "Tokyo". At that time GeoCities was headquartered at 9401 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, California.
thumb|The second and last GeoCities logo of 1998–1999|150px
Over time, many companies, including Yahoo!, invested extensively in GeoCities and, with the introduction of paid premium services, the site continued to grow. During May 1997, GeoCities introduced advertisements on its pages.
During June 1998, in an effort to increase brand awareness, GeoCities introduced a watermark to user Web pages. The watermark, much like an onscreen graphic on some television channels, was a transparent floating GIF image that used JavaScript to stay displayed on the bottom right corner of the browser screen. Many users felt the watermark interfered with the design of their Web site and threatened to relocate their Web pages elsewhere. The implementation of the watermark preceded the widespread adoption of CSS and the standardized Document Object Model and had cross-browser problems. However, GeoCities said in a press release that feedback regarding the watermark had been overwhelmingly positive.
The company became corporate during August 1998, being listed with the NASDAQ exchange with the code GCTY. The initial public offering price was $17, increasing rapidly after the initial offering to a maximum of more than $100. By 1999 GeoCities was the third-most visited site of the World Wide Web, behind AOL and Yahoo!. The headquarters had been relocated to 4499 Glencoe Avenue in Los Angeles, near the Marina del Rey area of Los Angeles County.
Acquisition by Yahoo!
thumb|The first Yahoo! GeoCities logo (1999–2009)|200px
During 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. The acquisition proved unpopular; users began to quit en masse in protest at the new terms of service specified by Yahoo! for GeoCities. The terms stated that the company owned all rights and content, including media such as pictures. Yahoo! quickly reversed its decision. and reduced the accessibility of free and low-price hosting accounts by limiting their data transfer rate for Web page visitors; since that time the data transfer limit for free accounts was said to be limited to 3 GB per month, but was enforced as a limit of about 4.2 MB per hour. The paid accounts were later unified in the Yahoo! Web Hosting service, with higher data transfer limits. During 2001, a rumor began that GeoCities was to be terminated; the chain e-mail making that claim cited an article in The New York Times that stated the opposite.
Closure
thumb|Logo of GeoCities before becoming defunct in 2009|200px
On April 23, 2009, Yahoo! announced that it would be terminating its United States version of GeoCities, and stopped accepting new registrations, though the existing GeoCities accounts remained active. GeoCities joined a long list of other services discontinued by Yahoo, such as Farechase, LAUNCHcast, My Web, Audio Search, Pets, Photos, Live, Kickstart, Briefcase, Webmessenger, and Yahoo! Teachers.
With the termination of GeoCities in the U.S., Yahoo! no longer offered free web page hosting, except in Japan, where the service continued for ten more years. Yahoo! encouraged users to upgrade their accounts to the fee-based Yahoo! Web Hosting service.
Rupert Goodwins, the editor of ZDNet, perceived the termination of GeoCities as an end of an era; he described GeoCities as "the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet."
In response to the termination, rival Web hosting services began to compete for the sites formerly displayed by GeoCities. For instance, German Web host Jimdo started the "Lifeboat for GeoCities" service to encourage GeoCities users to display their sites on Jimdo. Geocities-closing.com, started by GeoCities competitor uCoz, is a similar project begun to save GeoCities websites.<!-- Please do not list any other Web services *unless* other reliable sources cover particular hosting services responding to GeoCities's closure -->
Many of the webpages formerly hosted by GeoCities remained accessible, but could not be updated, until 2014. Attempts to access any page using the original GeoCities URL formerly redirected to Yahoo! Small Business, but now redirect to the Yahoo! main page.
Archiving efforts
Soon after the GeoCities termination announcement, the Internet Archive announced a project to archive GeoCities pages, stating "GeoCities has been an important outlet for personal expression on the Web for almost 15 years." Internet Archive made it their task to ensure the thoroughness and completeness of their archive of GeoCities sites. The former Web site InternetArchaeology.org also archived and showcased artifacts from GeoCities. The operators of the site Reocities downloaded as much of the content hosted on GeoCities as they could before it ended, in an attempt to create a mirror of GeoCities, albeit an incomplete one.
Another site attempting to build an archive of defunct GeoCities sites is GeoCities.ws. There is no formal relationship between GeoCities and geocities.ws, as it is a completely different company. Many sites were duplicated automatically from GeoCities to geocities.ws many months after the termination of GeoCities. Geocities.ws also promised free hosting, and for eight years this has been the case, . Other sites with this purpose were WebCite, as well as now-defunct Geociti.es (closed 2011), Oocities.org and Ge.ocities.org.
On the first anniversary of GeoCities' termination, Archive Team announced that they would release approximately 900 GB of data as a torrent file compressed to 641 GB by 7z compression, and did so on October 29, 2010. On April 9, 2011, Archive Team released a patch for the first GeoCities torrent.
Neighborhoods
In its original form, site users selected a so-called "city" in which to list the hyperlinks to their Web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content: For example, computer-related sites were displayed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood", hence the name of the site. Soon after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs. During 1996, GeoCities had 29 "neighborhoods", which had groupings of content created by the "homesteaders" (GeoCities users). By 1999, GeoCities had additional neighborhoods and refocused existing neighborhoods.
GeoCities Marketplace
During 1999, GeoCities included GeoCities Marketplace, a commercial website. It included the GeoStore, which sold GeoCities-branded merchandise. Users cashed in GeoPoints in the store.
Reception
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. during March 2006. During March 2008, GeoCities had 15.1 million unique U.S. visitors; however, during March 2009, GeoCities had 11.5 million unique visitors, a 24% decrease from March 2008.
GeoCities provided free home pages and e-mail address to children and adults who provided personally identifying and demographic information when they registered for the website. At the time of the complaint, GeoCities had more than 1.8 million members who were "homesteaders". GeoCities illegally permitted third-party advertisers to promote products targeted to GeoCities' 1.8 million users, by using personally identifiable information obtained in the registration process. These acts and practices affected "commerce" as defined in Section 4 of the Federal Trade Commission.