GeoCities: How Yahoo Bought and Buried a City of 38 Million Pages

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In late 1994 David Bohnett and John Rezner launched Beverly Hills Internet, a small web host in Southern California with an unusual way of organizing the early web. Pages lived in virtual neighborhoods named for real places, such as Hollywood, Wall Street, and Silicon Valley, and each address was a street number with neighbors on either side. By mid 1995 anyone could claim two megabytes of free space and build a home page. The company called its users homesteaders and soon renamed itself GeoCities.

This episode traces the boom and the demolition. A forced floating watermark broke hand-coded pages in June 1998 and set off user protests just before an IPO that sent shares from $17 past $100. Yahoo bought the site in January 1999 for $3.57 billion in stock, then claimed rights to user content, scrapped the neighborhoods, and throttled free pages. When Yahoo announced the shutdown of the United States service in 2009, volunteer archivists raced to copy what they could before it vanished.

By 1999 GeoCities was the third most visited site on the web, behind only AOL and Yahoo.
The Federal Trade Commission found GeoCities had sold members' personal data to marketers after promising not to, including information collected from children.
Yahoo's new terms of service asserted ownership of everything users posted, and the backlash forced a reversal within days.
Free accounts were capped at roughly 4.2 megabytes of data transfer per hour, so a few visitors at once could knock a page offline.
Archive Team released a 641 gigabyte torrent of rescued pages a year after the shutdown, while the Japanese version of the service survived until 2019.

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