Yahoo announced today that it is shutting down GeoCities, a free service that hosts personal home pages for consumers.
Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999, in a stock deal valued at roughly $4.6 billion.
A posting on a Yahoo Help page for GeoCities Thursday said the service was no longer accepting new customers and that it will be closing later this year, with more details about how individuals can save their data coming this summer.
In 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,” Yahoo said in a statement.
“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.”
Add this to the deal Yahoo made with Mark Cuban to buy Broadcast.com, also in the late 1990’s, and that equals about $10 Billion that Yahoo gave away.
Wow, Seems like yesterday I built my first web page on geocities. It was a clan webpage for the first Rainbow 6, the good ole days! What a waste of money! Why did they even buy? To promote their 34.95 domain prices? Geez Louis!
You just have to shake your head. They had these tools YEARS before MySpace and YouTube and HULU. They even had a connected Hollywood mogul as CEO. I would have though he’d turn Broadcast.com into a movie channel.
And don’t forget the $$ they threw out for Del.ico.ous (or however it’s spelled).
The big question is what about all thse PPC programs dependent on Yahoo?
Sounds like they are trying to trim the fat. I wonder how many PPC ads were clicked on in a day on Geocities pages.
Sometimes when you trim the fat, you waste a lot of meat.
true that. I’m sure somebody would have bought Geocities for some amount of money. Auction it off at TRAFFIC.
Yahoo realizes that it’s all about their brand that has suffered a lot of blows over the years. They need to repair that. Google, on the other hand, is much better at spawning or acquiring other niche market tools and incorporating them under the same hood.
Someday there will be a book written about Yahoo and it will be titled “How to screw up first mover advantage”.
Yahoo mail now sucks compared to gmail.
Search now sucks compared to gmail.
Yahoo video search now sucks compared to YouTube.
Geocites now sucks compared to Blogger.com and all the others that came after geocites.
Yahoo stores and auctions were early competitors to Amazon and Ebay. How did that work out for Yahoo?
They are clearly in survival mode while Google is flush with cash. I doubt Yahoo is getting any good talent these days so what’s left?
What does Yahoo do well that will win them a market… any market? Or, what do they have that they can sell? Search to Microsoft? Okay, that might buy them a few months. Then what do they have to sell or what market can they capture?
Can Yahoo survive?
The only yahoo product worth mentioning is Flickr. There is a community over there, more than any other photo sharing site.
Flikr good point.
They probably have to sell it.
Okay, I admit I had something to do with this decision by Yahoo to close GeoCities. I’ll come clean here for Mikey: I wanted all Geocities customers to come open accounts at WhyPark.com and get even better control over their websites, so I made a few phone calls to Yahoo’s marketing department (they didn’t actually have one, it was the assistant manager in their mail room) but first you ex-GeoCities’ customers gotta getta domain! I recommend Moniker.com, Fabulous.com if you’re going to build website muscle, or for quick and easy, Rebel.com. Then bookmark http://www.thedomains.com.