The Ashes

In Yahoo! GeoCities Help anunce:

We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways. We will be closing GeoCities later this year.

After 15 years of hosting free websites and 10 years under ownership of Yahoo!, GeoCities will be closing down this coming summer as part of Yahoo!’s belt-tightening measures, which also included the announcement a few days ago that 5pc of its workforce (700 employees) will be laid off.

The site hosted and provided free tools, but following Yahoo! acquisition and subsequent placement of ads on the site, coupled with limited data hosting plans for free account holders, it failed to turn around profits, having declared a US$8m loss for the final quarter of 1998.

With the advent of cheaper web-hosting services and free blogging platforms such as Blogger.com and WordPress in the early Noughties, the popularity of GeoCities began to decline.

The company hasn’t offered a simple path for migrating your data yet, but Yahoo! is suggesting users upgrades to paid Yahoo! web hosting accounts. There are no plans to offer a free web hosting service in the future.