Yahoo Will Shut Down Pioneering GeoCities Site

“GeoCities will close later this year.” That’s the stark announcement at the top of Yahoo’s GeoCities Help page.

The company goes on to say it is shutting down the ability of new customers to sign up for the free Web-hosting service and will close the service. “We’ll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer,” Yahoo says, “and we will update the help center with more details at that time.”

The announcement marks an ignominious end for one of the pioneering Web-hosting services. Originally founded in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, the service was purchased five years later by Yahoo for $3.57 billion.

Bursting Bubbles and Bad Management

Unfortunately for Yahoo — one of the many contributing factors to the company’s current fiscal dilemma — it purchased GeoCities at what proved to be the height of the dot-com boom. The bubble collapsed soon afterward and took the GeoCities share price with it.

The service’s financial problems were exacerbated by some questionable operational decisions by Yahoo.

The company sparked a mass exodus by issuing new terms of service that said, among other things, that the company owned all content posted to GeoCities Web pages (sound familiar, Facebook). Other users left when Yahoo capped data-transfer rates in an effort to encourage site owners to upgrade to paid hosting accounts.

In a conference call to discuss Yahoo’s first-quarter earnings, CEO Carla Bartz didn’t make a specific reference to the fact that Yahoo was about to electronically bulldoze GeoCities. However, she did make it clear that the company is trying to better prioritize aspects of its corporate structure most likely to be profitable.

Bartz told reporters that her conversations as a new CEO convinced her that the most important step for Yahoo is to create “a ‘wow’ experience for all of our users around the…

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