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2009 · Google & the web

Yahoo closes GeoCities: how the web lost millions of home pages

Last reviewed 5 October 2026

Yahoo bought GeoCities for billions in 1999 and switched it off a decade later. The closure became a turning point for web preservation.

What GeoCities was

GeoCities launched in the mid-1990s as a free home-page host. Users picked a themed “neighbourhood”, such as SiliconValley for technology or Hollywood for film, and built pages with their own HTML, animated GIFs, guestbooks and hit counters.

For a generation of internet users it was the first place they published anything. By the late 1990s it was one of the most visited sites on the web.

The Yahoo years

Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999 in an all-stock deal valued at several billion dollars at the height of the dot-com boom. The purchase was meant to bring a huge community of users into Yahoo’s portal.

Free hosting proved hard to make money from. Yahoo added advertising and premium plans, but users drifted to blogs, MySpace and Facebook, and GeoCities became a neglected corner of the company.

The shutdown

In April 2009 Yahoo announced that GeoCities would close later that year and stopped accepting new sign-ups. Existing users were offered paid Yahoo web hosting as an alternative. The US service closed on 26 October 2009.

Yahoo Japan kept its separate GeoCities service running for another decade before closing it in 2019.

Why it still matters

The closure prompted one of the first large volunteer rescue efforts for the web. Archive Team and others raced to copy as much of GeoCities as possible before the deadline, and the Internet Archive preserved a large share of it.

GeoCities is now the standard example used in discussions of “link rot” and digital preservation: when a platform owns the hosting, users’ work can disappear on a business decision.

Sources

  • Wikipedia: GeoCities
  • Yahoo, GeoCities closure notice to users, April 2009
  • Archive Team, GeoCities project records

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