If you are under 30 years old, it is possible that Geocities It may not sound familiar to you, but in the 90s it was as important as Gmail or Chrome can be today. Was the first free website hosting that became universalhosting 38 million websites. Today it has completely disappeared. What happened?
In the early 90s, the Internet began to reach homes en masse.. It already had millions of users, but it was still something extravagant for the general public, a kind of hobby for computer enthusiasts.
At that time, If you wanted to create your own website you had to hire quite expensive paid servicesmost offered by the operators themselves, or set up your own server. In November 1994, David Bohnett and John Rezner released a free hosting called Beverly Hills Internet, which soon changed to GeoCities. The revolution had begun.
Beginning and end of GeoCities
Its name is due to its curious system for hosting websites. Depending on the type of page, it was framed in a thematic city or neighborhood. For example, if you created a science fiction website, you would put it in Area51. If it was a movie, in Hollywood. If it was an anime, in Tokyo. Each user had a number that, together with the neighborhood or city and the domain Geocities.com, formed the URL address of the website.
It was a slower service than the paid ones and the web creation tools were very basic, you had to do everything yourself by programming, or with an application. But It was a great success because the accommodation was free. According to the blog Dfarqin just 13 months their websites already had 6 million visits, a very respectable figure for the time. In 1999 it became the third most visited website on the entire Internet.
Geocities It was key in the evolution of the Internet, because being free, people could create very crazy, fun websites, or focused on very specific topics, out of pure passion, without risking money.
And what happened to Geocities? Well, what always happens when a small technology company achieves success, or discovers a new technology. That a predator comes and eats it, flooding it with bills.
Now they are Google, Microsoft, Apple or Meta, turned into untouchable giants after buying hundreds of companies that threatened their dominance, or invented something promising. In the 90s, one of the biggest predators was Yahoo!
Geocities went public in 1998, with a share price of $17. But it quickly exceeded $100. Just one year later, Yahoo!, which at that time was the largest Internet search engine, bought it for $3.57 billion.
That was the beginning of the end. Yahoo! tried to monetize the serviceadding advertising and using tactics such as a slower speed or a photo limit for the free version, offering various paid subscriptions.
People were losing interest, because there were already alternatives. He April 23, 2009 Yahoo! announced the end of GeoCities, refusing to accept more users. It was active for a few years so that users would have time to migrate their websites. He disappeared in 2014.
Today few remember her, but GeoCities was key to the popularization of the Internet and the increase in contentbeyond the typical corporate, commercial, or educational websites that existed until that moment.