When will Geocities, the host of many free websites and natural habitat of animated gifs, shut down?
Yahoo has announced that it plans to shut down free web-hosting service GeoCities, which it acquired for $3.6 billion a decade ago. My first response to the news was, “Wait, GeoCities is still around?” The service has fallen far from its heyday in the late ’90s. I don’t know anyone with a GeoCities site anymore, and the name has become shorthand for ugly websites (featuring animated GIF files like the one below). Just in the last year, traffic to GeoCities sites has declined from 15.6 million to 11.7 million unique visitors, according to comScore. Meanwhile, struggling Yahoo isn’t in a position to support services that don’t pay off. Sources: http://venturebeat.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/23/yahoo-quietly-pulls-the-plug-on-geocities/ Yahoo Quietly Pulls The Plug On Geocities Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Yahoo! is unceremoniously closing GeoCities, one of the original web-hosting services acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $2.87 billion. (Fun venture fact: Fred Wilson’s Flatiron Partners was an investor). In a message on Yahoo!’s help site, the company said that it would be shuttering Geocities, a free web-hosting service, later this year and will not be accepting any new customers. Existing customers will still be able to access use GeoCities but Yahoo! is encouraging these customers to upgrade to Yahoo!’s paid Web Hosting service. 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 Ma
