GeoCities has finally closed on Monday, October 26, 2009. My five homepages with GeoCities could not be accessed anymore after ten long years of being hosted free at Yahoo! GeoCities. It was with GeoCities where I took my first interest in web design. GeoCities has been my training ground regarding coding in HTML until I finally moved on that there was more beyond HTML in web designing.
The five homepages were still accessible on Monday until the last few minutes of the day. I tried redirecting the homepages to the new websites but it was only functional until that Monday. When I checked the homepages today, I just got a message:
Sorry, the GeoCities web site you were trying to reach is no longer available.
GeoCities has closed, but there’s a lot more to explore on Yahoo!
Despite owning several domain names already related to those old homepages, I chose to maintain all my homepages with GeoCities. Those homepages ranked high at the search engine result pages. It would have been a pity to just ditch them. I have invested a lot of time on those homepages but GeoCities made a decision to close them down for me. 🙂
I did not transfer those homepages as I have recreated them using my own domain names a long time ago. The websites with my own domain names were not copies of the homepages but somehow some of the contents are related to the old homepages.
It is really a pity that GeoCities has to close down its free web hosting.
I was just thinking though, what if Yahoo! converted GeoCities into a blogging service like Blogger and allow the owners to publish advertisements using YPN (Yahoo! Publisher Network) instead of Google AdSense?
I know for a fact that Yahoo! put ads on the homepages hosted free at GeoCities some time ago but it was not for the benefit of the owners of the homepages. GeoCities homepage owners used to monetize their pages too but things have changed along the way.
If Blogger and Google are benefiting from their own services, why not Yahoo! benefiting from GeoCities as a blogging platform and YPN for publishing ads.
Well, probably Yahoo! did not want to invest into such as Yahoo! itself is using WordPress for their blogs instead of creating their own blogging software. I really do not know the real financial situation of Yahoo! and it is too late for me to say these things as Yahoo! closed GeoCities already.
Anyway, I had a lot of fun with GeoCities while it lasted.
Thank you, Yahoo! GeoCities for the ten-year free web hosting services!
It seems to me that it came after Microsoft bought a part of Yahoo, and it is not that Geocities does not pay itself with ads, but that the owners try to maximize profits. This philosophy of maximizing profits no matter who you must kill is killing the capitalist world.
And I do not believe they do not keep the records for eventual use, all this material we made during at least thirteen years has information value.
I hope most people did as I did, not paying and migrating to free services. If you pay u$ 60,00 the first year, then u$ 120,00 the second, and so on, for so little, you are feeding the wolf.
I personally believe that Yahoo is so money-faced that it could eventually ruin the company. Old GeoCities users who benefited from the free service can upgrade to a paid hosting service to keep their sites/files up. Yahoo has canceled many services in the past few years, and their alleged reason for these terminations was to provide their users with better services and experiences. But, the real reason for this is to simply save/make more money.