Computer

What happened to Geocities? Anyone could make a website

Create web pages easily and quickly without having knowledge it is not something new either. The first platform that offered that possibility was born almost 30 years ago. We are talking about Geocities.

The origin

Unlike other projects that were born on the Internet during its first years of operation, Geocities was not founded by two students, but by two entrepreneurs who wanted to create a community in which users could share your hobbiess, but instead of doing what social networks do today, they allowed them to create a web page where they could display the information they wanted to share.

The company that later became known as Geocities was born with the name Beverly Hills Internet in 1994 and changed its name to the one that made it famous a year later, in 1995. Geocities was a website where users could create their own web pages, websites that were initially grouped in well-known neighborhoods in the United States such as Hollywood, WallStreet, RodeoDrive , SunsetBulevar among others.

As the platform grew, additional city ​​names like Tokyo, Paris and Silicon Valley. Depending on the type of content that we wanted to create, we had to select which community we wanted to join, although there were many users who used any neighborhood or city without taking into account the theme of each one.

Geocities

In turn, as the community grew, each neighborhood and city was divided into subsections where you could find all kinds of content related to art, cinema, sports, science, humanities, music, among others. Each user had 2MB space completely free to create your content and the web address, URL, included the domain name (geocities.com) followed by the name of the neighborhood / city and a number that represents the number of web that was within that category.

From the Geocities home web page, all content was accessible through categories. But, in addition, it also included an Internet search engine that also allowed searches on the platform, a function that allowed it to grow even more. In 1998 he started listing on the NASDAQ and it did so on the right foot, as shares went on sale for $17 and topped out at $100. A year later, Geocities had become the third website with the most traffic on the Internet, behind America Online (AOL) and Yahoo!

the problems begin

In order to maintain the platform for free, advertising was not enough, so they were forced to create investment rounds (just like Startups do today). One of the companies that invested the most in Geocities was Yahoo!, who, in 1999, ended up buying it for 4 million dollars. Yahoo! began to make a series of changes to the terms of use that were not to the liking of the majority of users who, little by little, were abandoned platform for other alternatives that had reached the market without making much noise.

By 2001, Geocities had become an unprofitable company. To change it, Yahoo! had the brilliant idea to add how many premium and reduced the options of free accounts in addition to the data transfer rate from 3 GB per month to 4 MB per hour. The possibility of uploading websites created by applications such as Microsoft’s Frontpage, very popular at that time, was also limited, forcing the user to use the online tool that was available.

Geocities

As also happened with Altavista and many other companies, when Yahoo! I bought a company, it ended up closing and Geocities is one more example. Users were used to the fact that Geocities was free and the changes that the search giant introduced at that time did not sit well with the community, a community that began to forget about Geocities until, in 2009, lowered the blind forever.

Alternatives

Currently, if we are looking for a platform that allows us to create a web page totally free and personalized, the best option is Wix, a platform that allows you to contract a domain and eliminate advertising for very little money. Squarespace is another interesting alternative to 1&1 IONOS and Weebly. We cannot leave Canva aside either.

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