SUNNYVALE, Calif. – Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it plans to close GeoCities, a Web site publishing and hosting service it bought in May 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom for around $3 billion in stock. The service will be shut down later this year. Visitors to the site now see a message that says new GeoCities accounts will not be available and gives them the option to sign up for Yahoo’s Web hosting service for $5.98 a month.
It is not clear when Yahoo made the move, but a spokesman said in an e-mailed statement that the decision was recent.
GeoCities is not the only Yahoo service to get the ax – Yahoo Briefcase, Farechase, My Web, RSS ads, Yahoo Pets, Yahoo Live, Kickstart and Yahoo For Teachers all are being eliminated as well. The search giant also recently outsourced Launchcast radio to CBS Corp.
“As part of Yahoo’s ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers and results for advertisers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others,” the statement said.
The trimming is part of a process that started in 2007 while Jerry Yang was still chief executive, to close down services that aren’t profitable or don’t fit into company’s long-term vision.
The revamp has accelerated under new CEO Carol Bartz, who was hired in January.
In a sign of its ongoing troubles, Yahoo said Tuesday that it will lay off nearly 700 workers, the company’s third round of job cuts during the past 14 months.
Yahoo earned $118 million, or 8 cents per share, during the first three months of the year. That represents a 78 percent drop from net income of $537 million, or 37 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
Revenue fell 13 percent to $1.58 billion.
Yahoo shares rose 7 cents Thursday to close at $14.55.
Responses from the interwebs:
Believe it or not, the webpage service Geocities is still alive—but not for long. Fifteen years after its original creation, Yahoo has announced that it will shut down the service later this year. An exact date is not specified, but Yahoo is warning current users to consider moving to other options, such as Yahoo’s own Web Hosting service. Started in 1994, Geocities was like the Facebook to Angelfire’s MySpace—competing webpage services that allowed over-enthused HTML newbies to create artfully horrific webpages to represent themselves in the early days of the Internet. (I was a diehard Angelfire fan, myself.) Geocities was acquired by Yahoo in 1999 with the intent of extending Yahoo’s reach with its Internet advertising and services. – from Ars
I don’t think this is a good idea, partly because now, some people who built a space on Geocities for whatever purpose will now be forced to move elsewhere. But I can tell why this came around: they gave very low bandwidth for loading the sites, which often caused many that I tried to access to go offline and become unavailable for at least a few hours at a time. Free Web Hosting, a directory of services, no longer has them listed, but when they did, there were reader comments that complained about this. Yet Yahoo did nothing to make people feel better about using their sitebuilding services. And they wonder why they must’ve lost so many users? – from here
I’ll know that 2009 is the year GeoCities ended. But I’ll also remember that 10 years ago, it all started for me in GeoCities. – from here
GeoCities’ traffic has been falling over the past year. According to ComScore, GeoCities unique visitors in the U.S. fell 24 percent in March to 11.5 million unique visitors from 15.1 million in March of 2008. Back in October, 2006, it had 18.9 million uniques. – from Techcrunch
With GeoCities, a little piece of me is dying. This is the blurb I wrote for Chorus, Isolate, Confirm about everyone’s favorite free web host’s passage into eternity. Fellow alumni of the GeoCities School of Hard Knocks (And Bad Web Design) are encouraged to contribute their own anecdotes. – from here
