GeoCities — Yahoo Deleted the Handmade Web in 2009

GeoCities was where millions of ordinary people first built something on the web, and on October 26, 2009 Yahoo switched off the US service and deleted nearly all of it. Founded in November 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet and renamed GeoCities, the service gave anyone a free homepage — at first 2 MB of space — and organized those pages into themed “neighborhoods” with names like Hollywood, SiliconValley, Tokyo, and SunsetStrip. It was the handmade web in its purest form: under-construction GIFs, MIDI files that played on load, hit counters, blinking text, and the unfiltered enthusiasms of a generation discovering it could publish.

It was also enormous. By 1999 GeoCities was reportedly the third-most-visited site on the entire web, behind only AOL and Yahoo itself, and at its end it still served on the order of 38 million pages and drew something like 177 million annual visitors. Yahoo bought it at the very top of the dot-com boom, on January 28, 1999, for about $3.57 billion in stock — a price that captured exactly how central the amateur homepage seemed to the web’s future, right before that future moved elsewhere.

What moved elsewhere was self-expression. Blogging platforms, then MySpace, then Facebook and YouTube gave people easier ways to post without hand-coding HTML, and the personal homepage faded as a form. GeoCities, by then a neglected Yahoo property carrying years of accumulated pages and no obvious business model, was wound down: Yahoo announced the closure in 2009 and pulled the plug on the US service that October. The Japanese version, run separately, lasted until March 31, 2019.

This is one of the sober entries. The wit belongs to the corporate arithmetic — a $3.6 billion purchase deleted for housekeeping — but not to what was lost. When GeoCities went dark, millions of personal pages, the first websites countless people ever made, family tributes, fan shrines, and small homemade archives, were erased at once. The thing that saved a piece of it was not Yahoo but Archive Team, a volunteer collective that raced the clock to mirror as much of the neighborhoods as it could before deletion.