GeoCities

What GeoCities was

GeoCities was a free web hosting service and online community for personal home pages. Members, which it called Homesteaders, got free disk space on its servers and tools for publishing their own pages, along with free e-mail, chat and bulletin boards.¹

Its pages were grouped by topic into themed areas called neighborhoods. A member interested in finance could settle in WallStreet, a politics fan in CapitolHill, a music fan in SunsetStrip and a wine lover in NapaValley.²

The service was founded in December 1994, joined Nasdaq in 1998 and was bought by Yahoo in 1999.¹²³ It was one of the most visited destinations on the early World Wide Web: in December 1998 it drew about 19 million unique visitors, and Media Metrix ranked it the third most trafficked site on the internet.² Yahoo closed the US service on October 26, 2009, and the last surviving version, in Japan, ended at the close of March 2019.⁴⁵

Beverly Hills Internet and the first neighborhoods

GeoCities began as a company called Beverly Hills Internet, founded in December 1994 and incorporated in California that month.¹ Its founders were David Bohnett and John Rezner. Rezner was an IT manager at McDonnell-Douglas whom Bohnett recruited as a partner who knew the web.⁶

Beverly Hills Internet was a hosting business that gave people and companies space and basic tools to build their own pages, and it took its name from its office in Beverly Hills.⁷ The Computer History Museum describes an early project that streamed live webcam views of places such as West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. When users were invited to add their own pages on those themes, a rush of sign-ups followed.⁶

The idea of organizing pages as a town came to Bohnett in 1994, according to the 99% Invisible podcast. Members saw a two-dimensional map of streets and houses, and, in Bohnett’s words, “you would actually pick an address that you wanted to create your website.”⁷

The company launched an online community of six neighborhoods in January 1995. Through early 1996 most of its work went into building its software and servers, hiring staff, raising money and attracting Homesteaders.¹

Sources differ on when the name changed. The company’s own 1998 prospectus says it became GeoCities in early 1996,¹ while the Web Design Museum’s timeline dates the renaming to 1995.⁸

How homesteading worked

Joining worked like moving into a town. A new member chose a neighborhood, found a vacant address, filled out an application and moved in, and was expected to start building a site within three weeks.² Each page lived at an address inside its neighborhood. A July 1997 GeoCities newsletter quoted in a Federal Trade Commission complaint gives one example: http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/3696, a page in the children’s neighborhood.⁹ That kind of web address is a URL, and this one sat on GeoCities’ own domain.

Members did not need to write HTML, the code that web pages are made of, by hand. After the 1998 stock offering, Bohnett used the money to add tools and templates that let people build pages without HTML skills, along with a search engine for finding them.⁶ The company described its offer as free disk space plus “powerful web-page publishing tools.”²

A paid tier sat on top of the free one. For $4.95 a month, GeoPlus added better publishing tools, a personalized URL and up to 25 megabytes of disk space.² In March 1998 GeoCities added GeoShops, a program for small and home-based businesses to sell online.²

Volunteers did much of the work of running the neighborhoods. In mid-1998 GeoCities counted more than 1,000 active Community Leaders and Community Liaisons.¹ By its 1998 annual report it had more than 1,800 community leaders, elected by Homesteaders, who greeted and helped new members.²

Advertising paid for the free space. GeoCities sold banner ads, event sponsorships and premium positions on its site, and it did not begin earning advertising revenue until mid-1996.¹ Advertising made up 89.6% of its net revenue in 1998.² The company also placed a GeoCities watermark on members’ sites, and its annual report listed member acceptance of the watermark among its business risks.² Mental Floss reports that some members protested the watermark because it slowed pages for visitors on dial-up connections.¹⁰

Growth, the stock offering and the FTC privacy case

GeoCities grew quickly during the dot-com boom. Its own filings give these counts of Homesteads, meaning member sites:¹²

Members had created an estimated 15 million pages by mid-1998 and 32 million by the time of the annual report.¹² In April 1998 the site had more than 14 million unique visitors and over 850 million page views.¹ In December 1998 it had about 19 million unique visitors and more than 1.6 billion page views.²

The money did not keep pace. Net revenue was $46,000 in 1995, $314,000 in 1996 and $4.6 million in 1997, with net losses of $482,000, $3.0 million and $8.9 million in those years.¹ Revenue reached $18.4 million in 1998, and the accumulated deficit, the total of all losses so far, stood at $32.2 million at the end of that year. The company then had 281 full-time employees.² In 1998 its headquarters was at 1918 Main Street in Santa Monica, California.¹

GeoCities filed to go public on June 12, 1998, under the Nasdaq symbol GCTY.¹ It completed its initial public offering on August 14, 1998, selling 4.75 million shares at $17.00 each, and the underwriters exercised an option to buy another 712,500 shares. Net proceeds came to about $84.3 million.² In November 1998 it agreed to buy Starseed, Inc., which it ran as a subsidiary named WebRing, Inc.²

The first FTC internet privacy case

On August 13, 1998, the Federal Trade Commission announced a proposed settlement with GeoCities and called it the first FTC case involving internet privacy. At the time GeoCities had more than 2 million members.¹¹

The FTC said GeoCities had told members that information from its sign-up form would be used only to send the offers they asked for, while it actually shared the data, including optional details such as income and education, with third parties. It also said the GeoKidz Club and children’s contests were run by community leaders, not by GeoCities as the site implied.¹¹

The order required a clear privacy notice and parental consent before collecting personal information from children aged 12 and under, and it let members have their information deleted.¹¹ GeoCities admitted none of the allegations and paid no money.² The FTC issued its complaint on February 5, 1999, and announced the final order on February 12, 1999.⁹¹²

Yahoo GeoCities, 1999 to 2009

On January 28, 1999, Yahoo announced it would buy GeoCities for 0.3384 of a Yahoo share for each GeoCities share. Yahoo said more than 3.5 million members had built over 32 million pages, and Tim Koogle, Yahoo’s chairman and chief executive, called GeoCities “the Web’s most popular and widely used community.”¹³ CNNfn described it as a $3.6 billion deal.¹⁴

GeoCities’ annual report gives the ratio as 0.6768 Yahoo shares instead.² The two figures describe the same deal: Yahoo split its stock two for one, effective February 8, 1999, which doubled the number of Yahoo shares per GeoCities share.³ Yahoo completed the purchase on May 28, 1999, exchanging 21,640,342 of its shares.³

The 1999 terms of service dispute

On June 25, 1999, Yahoo posted new terms of service for GeoCities. They gave Yahoo a license to use members’ content in any way it wished, and members could not remove or change their sites without first accepting them.¹⁵ Members organized a boycott of Yahoo. Some turned their pages gray in a protest they called the “Haunting of GeoCities” and urged others to move to rival free hosts.¹⁶

Yahoo posted revised terms late on June 30, 1999, stating that it did not own or control the content on GeoCities sites and would use members’ sites only to promote its services.¹⁵ In an open letter to Homesteaders, Yahoo said it had made a mistake in trying to merge the two companies’ terms. By mid-July the boycott’s organizers declared the dispute over.¹⁶

New tools and slow decline

Yahoo kept adding page-building tools. Yahoo PageBuilder, a Java-based editor, entered beta in June 1999 and was released on September 22, 1999. It let members add images, links, forms and counters without knowing HTML, and came with templates, animations and background images.¹⁷ Tools like this were early forms of what is now called a website builder.

By the end, the main English-language site held about 38 million pages, according to the Computer History Museum.⁶ Bohnett later said users had “legitimate concerns that GeoCities will lose its independence” after the purchase,⁷ and the podcast reports that the site lost more users year after year.⁷

The closing of GeoCities

On April 21, 2009, Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz told investors the company would focus on products that generated most of its traffic and value.¹⁸ Two days later Yahoo said in a posting on its help pages that it had “decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts,” and said the service would close later in the year.¹⁹ Existing accounts were not changed at first, and Yahoo promised details on closing and saving site data that summer.¹⁸

Computerworld reported that Yahoo confirmed the date of October 26, 2009, in June, and that Yahoo’s FAQ made clear the pages would be deleted rather than kept.²⁰ In October Yahoo told remaining users that, as of that date, GeoCities sites would no longer appear on the web and that their files would be deleted with no way to recover them.²¹ The service was discontinued on October 26, 2009, as scheduled.⁴ The Register noted that Yahoo had paid $3.57 billion in stock for GeoCities a decade earlier.²²

GeoCities Japan

A Japanese company, GeoCities Japan, was set up in 1997, and the Japanese service ran as Yahoo GeoCities from 2000.⁵ It outlived the US service by almost ten years. Yahoo Japan announced that the service would end at the close of March 2019, saying that profitability and technical problems in keeping the system running made it hard to continue.⁵

GIGAZINE reported that new sign-ups and paid-plan changes stopped on January 10, 2019, and that pages stopped being shown on March 31, 2019.²³ Owners could still download their files over FTP for one more year. Yahoo Japan’s notice says the data could no longer be downloaded from April 1, 2020.⁵²⁴

Preservation

Much of GeoCities survives because others copied it before it was deleted. The Internet Archive, which had been archiving GeoCities sites for years in its regular crawls, invited owners in August 2009 to submit their pages for a special collection.²⁵ It ran extra deep crawls from July to October 2009, but it says it never had a complete list of GeoCities pages, so its copy is not complete.⁴

Archive Team, a volunteer group led by the archivist Jason Scott, also downloaded as much as it could. In October 2009 it estimated the content at about 10 terabytes, and Scott said he had archived roughly 8,000 sites himself by then.²⁰ The group’s own description of its archive says nearly 100 people took part over six months,²⁶ while Scott later told 99% Invisible that 200 to 300 people took part in total.⁷

On October 26, 2010, one year after the closing, Archive Team released its copy as a torrent, a file shared directly between users’ computers. Scott put the compressed archive at 652 gigabytes.²⁷ The data was later uploaded to the Internet Archive in eight parts.²⁶

Timeline

1. April 1, 2020Yahoo Japan stops letting owners download GeoCities data⁵
2. March 2019Yahoo GeoCities in Japan, the last version, ends service⁵
3. October 26, 2010Archive Team releases a 652 GB GeoCities torrent²⁷
4. October 26, 2009Yahoo discontinues GeoCities in the US and deletes its pages⁴
5. April 23, 2009Yahoo stops new GeoCities sign-ups and says the service will close¹⁹
6. September 22, 1999Yahoo releases PageBuilder, a Java-based page tool, for GeoCities members¹⁷
7. June 25, 1999Yahoo posts new GeoCities terms, setting off a members' boycott¹⁵
8. May 28, 1999Yahoo completes its purchase of GeoCities³
9. January 28, 1999Yahoo announces it will buy GeoCities¹³
10. August 14, 1998GeoCities completes its IPO at $17 a share²
11. August 13, 1998FTC announces its first internet privacy case, against GeoCities¹¹
12. October 1997GeoCities reaches 1 million Homesteads¹
13. January 1995Beverly Hills Internet launches a community of six neighborhoods¹
14. December 1994The company that became GeoCities is founded as Beverly Hills Internet¹

What it means for your website

See also

• Web hosting
• Website builder
• Internet Archive
• Dot-com bubble
• Web 2.0
• COPPA
• Free web building sites
• Website backups

References

1. GeoCities Form S-1 registration statement. GeoCities, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 1998-06-12. accessed October 22, 2026.
2. GeoCities Form 10-K annual report for 1998. GeoCities, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 1999-03-31. accessed October 22, 2026.
3. Yahoo Inc. Form 10-Q, quarter ended June 30, 1999. Yahoo Inc., U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 1999-08-16. accessed October 22, 2026.
4. GeoCities special collection 2009. Internet Archive. accessed October 22, 2026.
5. Notice of service closure (in Japanese). Yahoo Japan, Yahoo GeoCities. accessed October 22, 2026.
6. A Tale of Deleted Cities (Marc Weber). Computer History Museum. 2016-09-21. accessed October 22, 2026.
7. Episode 420: The Lost Cities of Geo (transcript). 99% Invisible. 2020-11-03. accessed October 22, 2026.
8. GeoCities, 1994. Web Design Museum. accessed October 22, 2026.
9. Complaint, In the Matter of GeoCities, Docket No. C-3850. Federal Trade Commission. 1999-02-05. accessed October 22, 2026.
10. 15 Megabytes of Fame: The GeoCities Story (Jake Rossen). Mental Floss. 2018-01-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
11. Internet Site Agrees to Settle FTC Charges of Deceptively Collecting Personal Information in Agency's First Internet Privacy Case. Federal Trade Commission. 1998-08-13. accessed October 22, 2026.
12. GeoCities, FTC Matter 982 3015, Docket C-3850. Federal Trade Commission. accessed October 22, 2026.
13. Yahoo to Acquire GeoCities (press release filed as an exhibit to Form 8-K). Yahoo Inc., U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR. 1999-01-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
14. Yahoo buys GeoCities. CNNfn, CNN Money. 1999-01-28. accessed October 22, 2026.
15. Yahoo Revises GeoCities Terms; Many Call for More. InternetNews. 1999-07-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
16. The moral of Yahoo feud: read fine print (Omar L. Gallaga, Cox News Service). Deseret News. 1999-07-14. accessed October 22, 2026.
17. Yahoo offers the web page tool PageBuilder to Yahoo GeoCities users (in Japanese). INTERNET Watch, Impress. 1999-09-22. accessed October 22, 2026.
18. Yahoo Demolishes GeoCities 10 Years, $3.6 Billion Later (Nicholas Kolakowski). eWeek. 2009-04-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
19. GeoCities demolished (Christopher Williams). The Register. 2009-04-24. accessed October 22, 2026.
20. Yahoo GeoCities closes on Oct. 26 (Ken Gagne). Computerworld. 2009-10-23. accessed October 22, 2026.
21. Yahoo Sets Final Shutdown Date For Geocities. SoCalTech. 2009-10-08. accessed October 22, 2026.
22. Yahoo nukes GeoCities (Cade Metz). The Register. 2009-10-26. accessed October 22, 2026.
23. Free homepage service Yahoo Geocities terminated service at the end of March 2019. GIGAZINE. 2018-10-01. accessed October 22, 2026.
24. Yahoo GeoCities page data can be downloaded until today, March 31, and all of it is deleted from April 1 (in Japanese, Hideto Tarui). Mado no Mori, Impress. 2020-03-31. accessed October 22, 2026.
25. geocities preserved. Internet Archive Blogs. 2009-08-25. accessed October 22, 2026.
26. The Archive Team Geocities Snapshot (Part 1 of 8). Archive Team, Internet Archive. 2009-10. accessed October 22, 2026.
27. Archiveteam: The Geocities Torrent (Jason Scott). ASCII by Jason Scott, textfiles.com. 2010-10-26. accessed October 22, 2026.

Web Building Encyclopedia. First published October 22, 2026. Last reviewed October 22, 2026. Every fact on this page is linked to a source we opened. Spotted an error? Write to [email protected].