Farewell, Geocities

A few weeks ago I received the following e-mail from Yahoo:

Dear Yahoo! GeoCities customer,

We're writing to let you know that Yahoo! GeoCities, our free web site building service and community, is closing on October 26, 2009.

On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and files.

I checked quantcast.com to see how much traffic it got, and it was still getting almost 12 million visits from the U.S., down about 3 million from six months ago, but still big enough to rank as 58th biggest site. It is remarkable that yahoo was not able to make money on that much traffic, but that may say a lot about why yahoo has not done well.

A comment on the closing at techcrunch.com:

There are plenty of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Webs, Jimdo, Snapages, Weebly, and countless more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.

Geocities was founded in 1995 Yahoo purchased it in 1999 for several billion--the number differed. Wikipedia has a good history of the site.

A PC World blog was rather snarky, but pointed to the problems the site had:

GeoCities grew weaker by the month. The proliferation of low-cost hosting options, combined with the increasing popularity of social network-style services in place of personal home pages, only contributed to its demise.

GeoCities is survived by two cousins, Angelfire and Tripod, along with an uncle, Jeeves. All three are believed to be terminally ill.

Others will follow, including, in time, this site. I have (soon had) a page there, along with pages at tripod and angelfire. Since angelfire and tripod put google ads on the pages, they may actually be making some money.