A History of Geocities

Birth, Life and Death of one of the most famous webhosting services in the world by Giovanni Airskadt and Jason Scott for the Archive Team (http://archiveteam.org)
The birth of the service we now know as GeoCities can be pinpointed to somewhere around late 1994, then known as Beverly Hills Internet. It featured a free webpage hosting service which, during the time, was a very unusual thing to see. Created by David Bohnett (CEO of OVGuide and founder of the Bohnett Foundation) and John Rezner, the webhosting service initiated first as a beta program called Beverly Hills Internet's "Homesteading the Web." After announcing itself in June of 1995, then as GeoPages, it later changed its name to "Geocities".
GeoCities featured a nice system of "Web Directory Listing", which consisted of categorizing websites after a certain "region" which was sometimes, in turn, based on the real world. With the help of some new features such as forums and chat, by the end of 1995 GeoCities would process around 2000 new accounts per day, and monthly page views were counted by the millions. In 1996 it is estimated that the site reaches its millionth user ("homesteader") mark.
By 1996, GeoCities was the fifth most visited website in the entire Net. With one million users, and more millions of page views per month, it was a powerhouse of hosted sites, and responsible for bringing people online and creating webpages at an unprecedented clip. With 15 MB of allocated space, the users found a way to make every single kilobyte count for their needs; someone that had just started to use the Internet during the golden age of GeoCities could now compare it to the degree of modern-age Facebook: If you had a certain degree of knowledge of computer use during that time, it is certainly likely you had a GeoCities website, most likely a homepage about yourself or your school, or a hobby you had interest on. This also applies to the present, but with the existence of new technologies, GeoCities has become outdated, with things like Google Pages being much more appealing and powerful to the end-user. What is important here is the fact that during the mid-through-late nineties, GeoCities has been a major gear in the big machine that is the Internet - A gear that has grown in size over time with millions of WebPages with an innumerable amount of content of many different topics. Geocities had become, in some ways, invaluable.
In 1999 GeoCities was bought by Yahoo, one of the most important investors in the service, for $3,570 million USD worth of stock ($3.6 billion). While the transfer process was not smooth and many users left because of the updated ToS (Which claimed that all uploaded information belonged to Yahoo), the situation was quickly rectified and the webhosting service gained a final boost in popularity. In July of 1999, the new administration no longer followed the geographical "City" system that gave the name to the service. The most known argument in favor of this move is that the system was not used properly, and it slowed down the influx of new accounts. By the end of 1999, GeoCities was the third most visited site, right behind AOL and Yahoo.
In 2001, things slowly started to go downhill. After the beginning of a new millennium with new things for GeoCities (such as the Geostore), unconfirmed reports appear on the Web, stating that Yahoo was losing money on the service. In this year, Yahoo released a premium hosting service, which gave more hosting space and unlimited bandwidth. Although this look nearly as a response to the rumors, the service caught on.
Years go by, and the free service of GeoCities is not that appealing anymore. Cheaper hosting solutions appear on the Internet nearly every day during that period of time, and the service is almost obsolete by now; besides, most websites hosted at GeoCities started becoming outdated for a while now, and their owners most of the time switched to a better webhosting service. GeoCities stopped being the top-of-the-line webhosting company to become a simplistic, outdated website that offered a very insignificant amount of space. And although that did not stop the service from being used and visited, it surely decreased since its golden age: For example, from 2006 to 2008 GeoCities goes from 18,900,000 unique visitors to 11,500,000. High numbers, but with an important difference between them.
In April 23 of 2009, Yahoo announced the closure of GeoCities. Registrations are closed, and all data is to be erased. In June a deadline is given, October 26th. Years and years of data gone forever.

Timeline of GeoCities. major events

Format is MM/DD/YYYY