Yahoo has decided to put GeoCities to rest.
The free Web hosting service was groundbreaking in its day, so much so that Yahoo purchased it in 1999 for $2.87 billion.
But in a posting on the site, the Internet portal said it was no longer accepting new GeoCities accounts and would close the service later this year. “We’ll share more details this summer,” the posting said.
It isn’t hard to understand why Yahoo pulled the plug. The company is undergoing a massive refocusing as it pares its broad arsenal of online properties to nurture new growth.
GeoCities represents the first iteration of the Web. The Web page hoster was created when bandwidth costs were high, when computers and storage were expensive, and when datacenters were staffed with large teams of engineers to keep them running.
Yahoo will shut GeoCities later this year
Yahoo ran advertising on each page to pay the bills.
“That business model is so Web 1.0,” says Yola CEO Vinny Lingham in a blog post. “Yahoo has finally proved that the old advertising model on free websites will not stand the test of time.”
Lingham goes on to flog his company’s advertisement free business model that relies instead on charging for premium Web hosting services.
But he has a point. Yahoo appears to have made the cardinal sin in high tech. It didn’t rethinking the business and recreate it as time went by. Now it is paying the price.
