Yahoo has now officially shut down Geocities, taking thousands of quality websites offline for good. Of course in a corporate world where the bottom line is king, the move probably makes sense, but for me and millions of other webmasters who got their “start” on Geocities, it’s a sad event indeed.
Back when the Internet and I were both young, I discovered that Geocities would allow a country boy from the hills and hollers of southwestern Virginia to create a website that could be instantly seen and enjoyed by folks all around the world. That first crude site looked horrible by today’s standards, but it entertained visitors from all over the planet who returned time and again to see if I had anything new to share with them. And I usually did. After a couple of years I moved on to a paid web host in order to avoid having Geocities’ ads on my site, and I haven’t hosted a site there since. But I have visited a large number of great Geocities sites over the years, a couple of them just last month. Alas, now they are all gone.
To be fair, Yahoo gave the owners of the sites hosted by Geocities plenty of warning about the impending closure so the ones who failed to move their sites to another web hosting company have no one to blame but themselves. But many of those sites contained information that was incredibly interesting and unique on the web, but of little use for generating revenue – hence the reluctance of many webmasters to expend the time and money required to move them. And the loss of those sites will be felt.
I’m certainly not a corporate tycoon so I can’t claim that Yahoo made a poor business decision to shut down a venue that received 10 million unique visitors per month, but I do know that if I had that many eyeballs looking at ads on my sites I could probably find a way to make it quite profitable. But the bottom line is this: Geocities is gone, and many of us who cut our Internet teeth on the service will miss it greatly.