Yahoo Takes $4 billion Hit As It Closes Geocities

Yahoo Inc. on Thursday announced that it will be closing GeoCities, a free web hosting service that the internet company snapped up for a massive $4 billion around 10 years ago, when the dotcom boom was at its peak. 

A post on the Help page for GeoCities notified that the service was not accepting new accounts anymore and that it will be shutting down sometime around later this year, with further info on how users can save their data slated for this summer. 

The move comes within a few days after Yahoo’s chief exec Carol Bartz announced that the company would cut around 5 percent of its workforce, as it is struggling hard to reinvigorate its growth in this uncertain economic situation. 

This is the second time in around a week when Yahoo announced closure of its online services, as the company already announced shutting down its online video editing service Jumpcut. 

Furthermore, US visitors to the web hosting service plunged notably by 25 percent to 12 million in March from the same period a year ago, according to figures released by the analyst firm ComScore Inc. 

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GeoCities was among the forerunners in building online communities, with the service hosted more than 3.5 million websites in the late 1990s. 

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Our Comments

Geocities will be fondly remembered by many of us, not least because a significant number of geeks used its platform to build their first websites ever. The likes of Xoom, Fortunecity, Tripod or Angelfire helped quite a few of us at the very beginning. Like Google though, Yahoo is pruning non productive areas and this culling is likely to continue soon. Could Yahoogroups be the next one out?

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