GeoCities

GeoCities was the free web-hosting service where the 90s internet built its first homepages, founded in late 1994 and organised into themed "neighborhoods". Yahoo bought it for $3.57 billion in stock in 1999, at the dot-com peak, and shut it down on 26 October 2009, erasing millions of personal pages.

Timeline

1994

November 1994 Launch

Founded as Beverly Hills Internet

Free homepages organised into themed neighborhoods.

1997

October 1997 Peak

One million "homesteaders"

GeoCities neighborhoods pass a million member-built pages.

1998

1998 Peak

Third most-visited site on the web

Behind AOL and Yahoo (Media Metrix).

11 August 1998 Funding

GeoCities IPO

Shares nearly double on the first NASDAQ trading day.

13 August 1998 Legal

FTC privacy settlement

The first internet privacy enforcement action: GeoCities settles over selling member data.

1999

28 January 1999 Acquisition

Yahoo announces $3.57 billion acquisition

All-stock deal at the height of the bubble; closes in May.

2009

23 April 2009 Shutdown announced

Yahoo announces GeoCities will close

New registrations stop immediately.

25 August 2009 Incident

The scramble to save GeoCities

Internet Archive and Archive Team race to mirror hundreds of thousands of sites before the shutdown.

26 October 2009 Shutdown

GeoCities shuts down

Millions of pages deleted; Archive Team preserves ~1TB.

2019

31 March 2019 Shutdown

GeoCities Japan closes

The separately-run Japanese service outlives the original by a decade.

Ownership

Beverly Hills Internet / GeoCities 1994–1999 Founded Renamed GeoCities in 1995; IPO August 1998

Yahoo 1999–2009 Acquisition, $3.57B One of the defining dot-com-peak acquisitions

Key figures

Metric	Value	As of	Confidence
Monthly active users	10.3 million	September 2009	Reported US unique visitors just before shutdown (comScore)

Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate

Why it shut down

Official line: Yahoo said it decided "after careful consideration" to close GeoCities and focus on helping users build sites elsewhere.

Our analysis: Yahoo paid $3.57 billion at the dot-com peak for a community it never figured out how to monetise, then let it stagnate for a decade as social networks replaced homepages. The shutdown deleted millions of personal sites; volunteer archivists saved what they could.

History

Neighborhoods

GeoCities began in late 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, giving anyone free space to build a homepage in a themed "neighborhood": SiliconValley for tech, Area51 for sci-fi, Heartland for family pages. Animated GIFs, guestbooks, visitor counters and MIDI autoplay were its native art forms. By 1998 it was the third most-visited site on the web.

$3.57 billion, then the trash can

Yahoo bought GeoCities in early 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, weeks before the bubble's peak, and immediately alienated the community with a terms-of-service claim on user content. As blogs, MySpace and Facebook replaced the hand-built homepage, GeoCities stagnated; by 2009 it still had over ten million monthly visitors but no strategy. Yahoo announced the closure in April 2009 and pulled the plug on 26 October 2009. The Archive Team's frantic rescue of roughly a terabyte of pages became a founding moment of the digital-preservation movement; GeoCities Japan, run separately, survived until March 2019.

Timeline

How it looked