Finally, Yahoo! GeoCities, a web hosting service founded by David Bohnett and John Rezner in late 1994 and later acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, will be closing down on Oct. 26. The 15-year-old service, which offers surfers a space to set up their own, personalized homepage, was once a very popular platform before the launch of Google’s Blogger and open source content management platform just like Wordpress is closing down silently.
If you look at the Yahoo help center and search for ‘Why is Geo cities is closing‘, this is what Yahoo has to say:
“We have enjoyed hosting web sites created by Yahoo! users all over the world, and we’re proud of the community you’ve built.
However, we have decided to focus on helping our customers explore and build relationships online in other ways. Beginning on October 26, 2009, you will no longer be able to use GeoCities to maintain a free presence online — but we’re excited about the other services we have designed to help you connect with friends and family and share your activities and interests. “
The recent traffic stats from compete.com show that the site has not been doing so well and has been dying all year long. Here is a traffic generation report according to compete.com:
There are lots of other Website creation and hosting services out there, including blog platforms such as Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad, Blog.com as well as Website creation and hosting services such as Ning, Weebly, and many more. GeoCities never really kept up with the times, but always remained a decent pageview generator.
R.I.P GeoCities!
