Yahoo’s $3.65 Billion Mistake: Yahoo Closes GeoCities

[brown9-2]

Just because Yahoo spent $3.65 billion on this acquisition 10 years ago, and now they are shutting down the service, does not mean that the $3.65 billion was wasted.

The article makes no mention of technology, users, services, etc, that may have been integrated into Yahoo from Geocities - which certainly would not be a waste.

Just because they are now terminating the original service does not mean that the acquisition was a waste.

[pg]

They got one of the most important things they wanted from Geocities, which was to remain the #1 (= most unique visitors) web site. That counted for a lot back then. Competitors like Lycos were pulling all kinds of tricks to jack up visitor numbers, like getting the NFL to put the Super Bowl web site at superbowl.lycos.com. One could argue that Yahoo overpaid to remain #1, but it was worth something.

That was practically the only thing Yahoo got from Geocities though.

[raganwald]

Cynical thought:

Is it really important to shutter these services to "focus on their core competencies" or is it really important to give Wall Street the appearance of doing something, anything?

IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Or is this just a way of showing the world that management is "getting serious" and "making changes?"

[fizx]

> IOW, is Geocities really consuming management attention? is it losing buckets of money? Is it diluting Yahoo! brand?

Maybe it just has some good engineers tied up?

[skinnymuch]

This is exactly what I've been wondering, with all the stuff Yahoo is shutting down.

[andr]

"To quickly download your published files, visit your GeoCities web site, right-click on each page, and choose Save Page As... from the menu that appears."

Ouch! They could at least provide an export tool.

[dragonquest]

True, however wget seems like a good option. Try

http://www.nowindows.net/wp/?p=94

[tibbon]

Textfiles has been working hard to make an archive of Geocities. I need to call Jason and see how that went.

[Mark_B]

I wonder if anybody did something similar for Compuserve's version (ourworld.cs.com) before it closed up in July.

[mleonhard]

My first webpage was on GeoCities. I learned HTML and made my own bullet graphics. I scanned a tablecloth and made a tiling background with Paint Shop Pro. This was all on Windows 3.1 and IE2, if I remember correctly.

Those were the days. :)

[brk]

Wow, Windows 3.1. The TCP/IP stack on that was horrible, surprised to managed to get online ;)

[clutchski]

let its gifs spin forever in our minds.

[pavel_lishin]

"Under destruction"

[GiraffeNecktie]

So was GeoCities the FaceBook of 1999?

[boredguy8]

Perhaps a better analogy is MySpace, on account of the "copy/paste" approach people with little technical skill used to do things like add templates.

[brk]

I've said several times that Facebook is the GeoCities of Web2.0 (and I ultimately think it will suffer the same fate).

When GeoCities was in its prime it was pretty significant. Between some of the core features of GeoCities and add-ons like guestbooks, webrings, ICQ badges, etc., there was a good degree of "social networking", for the state of things at the time.

[TheBranca18]

No. Not even close.

[dotcoma]

well, GeoCities sure brought them a ton of users, and even if they were expensive compared to how Google or Facebook got their users, it was different back then, and buying a successful company may have been less expensive (and successful, at least) in the end than doing a lot of pointless tv commercials.

BTW, getting rid of Yahoo! Games, Yahoo! Shopping, Zimbra (given how poor the current Yahoo! Mail is) and del.icio.us does not seem very wise to me...

[meterplech]

they are focusing on their core-competencies. yahoo can't be the best at everything, so they are going to sell the things that are distracting them from the goods

[theklub]

I hope all of that information was saved somewhere. Although I'm sure most of it turned into wikipedia pages.

[jimmyrcom]

Yahoo isn't dead yet? Don't forget their podcast.com Mark Cuban bs and saying $37 a share was too low for a microsoft aquisition.

[skinnymuch]

Their stock is pretty solid still.

[jimmyrcom]

and this recently http://government.zdnet.com/?p=5547

[armadilko]

Yep they have to consolidate their business there is a lot of waste there.