On Thursday, Yahoo announced it will be shutting down Geocities this year, a free web hosting service it acquired for shitloads of cash a decade ago, reportedly 3-5 billion dollars. One can only assume it’s getting canned because it’s no longer profitable. (And no wonder, the ad placement is pitiful. No one clicks on ads when you line them up in a frame on the right side of a webpage.) And let’s not forget how with the whole “stock market tanking” in today’s stock market how that plays into such decisions!
Geocities was my very first home on the web. This is where I set up my personal pages on poetry and animal rights as a teenager, that were actually pretty popular and reached out to a lot of people. So weird that Geocities simply won’t exist anymore. There must have been hundreds of thousands (or millions?) of websites on their servers. Ironically, all of mine simply disappeared on their own accord after years of inactivity, so this is just pure mental nostalgia on my part.
And just to walk down that road, man, it reminds me of the old crew of free web hosts:
- Geocities
- Tripod
- Angelfire
- FortuneCity
God, who else?
And now it’s wordpress, blogger, today, and oh – about a million more.
On the plus side, I had wondered if it was worth it to set up a bunch of mini-blogs and mini-sites on Geocities in an effort to create backlinks to my niche sites. Good thing I didn’t start that yet!
RIP Geocities
1994-2009
Special RIP shoutout goes out to my neighbors @…/CapitolHill/Lobby.
PS Can you imagine the day when something like WordPress will go under just because it’s not relevant anymore?