If you were a “cool” kid in the late ‘90s, then you definitely decided to try your hand at learning HTML by creating your own Geocities website… right? Okay, it probably was not actually cool. But, speaking from personal experience, it was a lot of fun to put together the bright colored backgrounds and various images that really had no purpose other than to show your personality preferences. Let’s be honest, these websites were not graphic design masterpieces. They were garish and crazy and pretty ridiculous.
In 1994, the early days of the world wide web, David Bohnett and John Reznor started a company called Beverly Hills Internet, a web hosting service for small and local businesses. Believing that the web was the future, they set up their company on their own dime, setting up a few servers, and offering up around 15mb of free webpage space to attract new customers — yeah, 15mb sounds like diddly squat these days, but back then it was pretty decent. Web hosting wasn’t an altogether new idea at the time — Tripod had started doing something similar around the same time — but what made Bohnett and Reznor’s idea unique was in how they set it up.
They created a directory organized into subsections called neighborhoods, where each neighborhood represented what your website would be about. In 1995, there were six neighborhoods to choose from: Colosseum, Hollywood, RodeoDrive, SunsetStrip, WallStreet, and WestHollywood. The idea was that you would pick the neighborhood that best represented what your website would be about, so if you chose Hollywood, it was going to focus on films and actors, or if you chose WallStreet, it was all about finance and business.
Soon enough, in late 1995, the company updated their name from Beverly Hills Internet to Geocities to better fit their neighborhood aesthetic, so when you became a new Homesteader (the awesome moniker for users), your web address would be something like geocities.com/Hollywood/5987. The number was your specific address in your chosen neighborhood, sort of like a street address. It really was a pretty ingenious way to organize websites and create online communities for people from the moment they signed up. For the generation of young people exploring this new and exciting online world, it was amazing to have a built-in community of like-minded people.
Geocities quickly skyrocketed to popularity and national consciousness, generating millions of views and users, and eventually went public on the US stock exchange in August 1998 with a price of $17/share. That price managed to get as high as $100/share, and by 1999, Geocities was the third-most visited website in the world, following only AOL and Yahoo! Alas, this era was what would become the height of Geocities, as it was soon acquired by Yahoo! in January 1999, and began its rapid decline. Indeed, just 10 years later, in 2009, Yahoo shuttered Geocities in the United States — though Geocities was super popular, it never was really able to make a profit.
Sadly, though I definitely had a Geocities website (I think it was in the SouthBeach neighborhood but I’m not 100% sure), I don’t have a screenshot of it anywhere, so I can’t share what it looked like. But, learning how to do some HTML on that website made it possible for me to eventually create websites like Retropond and my personal blog, so I have to give it up to Geocities, always. What about you? Did you have a Geocities website, and if so, do you remember what neighborhood you were in? Let us know in the comments!
- During the height of Geocities, around 1996, the site had 29 different neighborhoods to choose from, so if your original favorite was full, you had other options. Though, to be honest, Geocities never enforced that the websites in a particular neighborhood actually adhered to the topic they were meant to.
- Soon after the announcement of the closing of Geocities, the Internet Archive announced a project to archive all of the Geocities websites. The best archive these days is at The Geocities Gallery.
- Yahoo! purchased Geocities for $3.57 billion in stock in 1999. At the time, Yahoo! stock was worth about $500/share. As of early 2021, it’s worth about $53/share.
- Prior to its acquisition by Yahoo!, Geocities had a subsidiary in Japan. Whereas the US Geocities closed in 2009, the Japanese version hung around until 2019.
- In May 1997, Geocities introduced advertising on its webpages, and in June 1998, they also introduced a watermark onto its users pages in an effort to increase brand awareness — it was a transparent floating gif in the bottom right corner. The beginning of the end of the fabulous free hosting service, for sure.
- During the height of Geocities, around 1996, the site had 29 different neighborhoods to choose from, so if your original favorite was full, you had other options. Though, to be honest, Geocities never enforced that the websites in a particular neighborhood actually adhered to the topic they were meant to.
- Soon after the announcement of the closing of Geocities, the Internet Archive announced a project to archive all of the Geocities websites. The best archive these days is at The Geocities Gallery.
- Yahoo! purchased Geocities for $3.57 billion in stock in 1999. At the time, Yahoo! stock was worth about $500/share. As of early 2021, it’s worth about $53/share.
- Prior to its acquisition by Yahoo!, Geocities had a subsidiary in Japan. Whereas the US Geocities closed in 2009, the Japanese version hung around until 2019.
- In May 1997, Geocities introduced advertising on its webpages, and in June 1998, they also introduced a watermark onto its users pages in an effort to increase brand awareness — it was a transparent floating gif in the bottom right corner. The beginning of the end of the fabulous free hosting service, for sure.
