Yahoo Inc. on Thursday announced that it will shut down GeoCities later this year. GeoCities was a free personal web-hosting service that Yahoo bought in 1999 for around $4 billion at the peak of the dot-com boom. Currently new registrations are disabled and Yahoo is encourage existing users to upgrade to Yahoo! Web Hosting.
It is not clear why Yahoo! decided to close GeoCities. But is a statement Yahoo said, ” We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.”
During dot com boom, GeoCities was one of the most popular free web-hosting services that helped millions of people create their first web page. There were more than 3.5 million sites hosted on its service when Yahoo acquired it for $3.57 billion in 1999. But soon GeoCities started to loose users due to new Terms of Services provided by Yahoo. And with popularity of social networking sites and blogs the popularity graph of GeoCities dropped severely. According to ComScore, GeoCities had 11.5 million unique visitors in March 2009, down 24% from 15.1 million unique visitors in March 2008. So, ultimately Yahoo gave the kill command!
Wait! GeoCities is not alone! some other Yahoo! service such as Yahoo Briefcase, Farechase, My Web, RSS ads, Yahoo Pets, Yahoo Live, Kickstart and Yahoo For Teachers all are being eliminated as well. It is reported that the process of closing non-profitable Yahoo services started back in 2007 when Jerry Yang was the CEO of Yahoo! Inc. Now current CEO Carol Bartz have speed up the process with more focus on company’s long-term vision and some fresh layoffs!
I will never for get GeoCities! Because it inspired me to create websites. During my College and Uni days I used to play with it whenever I had free time. It is not that GoeCities was the best free web hosting service with best technology. It was slow and simple. But it helped many people like me who loved to create web pages during free time! What you say?
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I almost forgot that Geocities is still existed because there are lots of other free webhosting services.
When I was a teen, I used to use the free webhosting service like Geocities.
But now I use the paid hosting as it gives more freedom.
But we don’t have to worry as we can easily find the one that at par with Geocities.
i have try geocities before. But i guess, i need to forget them now..
For those who have an account with geocities, they can try to get a new account for free with DreamHost. Need to be hurry, 1000 signup only.
http://bloggermaniacs.com/tech-news/free-2-years-domain-name-webhosting-for-geocities-users