Ten years ago, Yahoo! purchased the service that offers a free tool for creating websites and web hosting for more than 4 billion USD. Ten years later, GeoCities has been declared an underperforming product and will be closed later this year. GeoCities’ technology is crude and originally designed for slower Internet connections, making the social networking service pale in comparison with the more high-tech sites such as Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook.
Just recently, GeoCities had to close 5% of its jobs, affecting more than 600 employees, as part of its cost-cutting measures. The group’s net income has dipped 78% in the first quarter.
GeoCities started as a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California, creating its own Web directory. In mid-1995, the company started to offer its users the tools and services to develop their free home pages, chat, and post in community bulletin boards. By end of 1995, the site was garnering more than six million monthly page views. In May 1997, GeoCities introduced advertisements on its pages. The following month, it became the fifth most popular site on the Web.
Yahoo! has announced that it does not offer another free hosting service, but encourages clients to opt for the company’s ‘award-winning Yahoo! Web Hosting service which includes a personalized domain name and matching email, new site building tools, unlimited disk space and bandwidth, premium customer support, and more.
