Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)(money.cnn.com)
money.cnn.com
Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
http://money.cnn.com/1999/01/28/technology/yahoo_a/
37 comments
If you can't find it on reocities, try http://oocities.com as well. No idea which generally has more or if they both have pretty solid collections. My lame 12-year-old music fan site is preserved on both!
Not sure if this is the best place to ask, but I get a "page not found (yet)" (when I attempt to get to my old site) which suggests that you're still in the process of restoring pages. Is this still the case? Or do I assume that my data is long gone at this point.
Edit: Even if my data is gone, I really appreciate what you've done; and I'm sure others do too. Wish Yahoo had shuttered it more gracefully.
Edit: Even if my data is gone, I really appreciate what you've done; and I'm sure others do too. Wish Yahoo had shuttered it more gracefully.
I am really sorry, unfortunately it is pretty safe to assume the data is long gone unless one of the other preservation efforts snagged it.
I have very long list of wanted sites but only a handful of those were recovered in the last year (mostly from local caches on old pc's).
I don't think the archive will every be completed.
I have very long list of wanted sites but only a handful of those were recovered in the last year (mostly from local caches on old pc's).
I don't think the archive will every be completed.
No need to be sorry. Thanks for setting the service up and trying! I'm sure it's helped lots of people.
As for my site; I'm sure I have backup's (somewhere :) of the really valuable data. It's just more for taking a look at My First Website and reeling at the horror more than anything else.
As for my site; I'm sure I have backup's (somewhere :) of the really valuable data. It's just more for taking a look at My First Website and reeling at the horror more than anything else.
Ugh. I think my old page had a "Free Kevin Mitnick" banner next to an animated gif that said "Made with Macintosh". Not that these clues narrow it down very much, if you want to find my page.
Hack the planet, dude. :)
I love the story about how you did all this, especially considering the time constraint of Geocities shutting down in a couple of days: http://www.reocities.com/newhome/makingof.html
Awesome job!
Awesome job!
Is there anything like this for Homestead.com? I can't remember any Geocities URL's
Homestead is still up and running, though we did start culling sites that had no visits and no logins a while ago.
(I was a co-founder of Homestead.)
(I was a co-founder of Homestead.)
How much does it cost you to host it? How do you host it (from compressed archives)?
It's all static, no compression (just one large xfs file tree), it costs a few hundred euros per month. At the time the server (20T) was quite expensive, one of these days it will have to be re-done and fortunately storage costs have come down quite a bit so the per-month write off on the server will be (a lot) lower.
Oh I wish I had that much money for side projects.
You could save a lot of space by hosting from a compressed filesystem or compressed archives (eg through avfs) at the cost of some CPU cycles.
You could save a lot of space by hosting from a compressed filesystem or compressed archives (eg through avfs) at the cost of some CPU cycles.
also http://geocities.ws has an archive.
i was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers...
>> how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers...
Well, it certainly made Mark Cuban a billionaire, if nothing else!
You're forgetting the opportunity cost to buy other things.
In 1997, Yahoo turned down the offer to acquire Google for $1,000,000.
That was not a good call. I wonder how many other missed opportunities those $3.8B had.
In 1997, Yahoo turned down the offer to acquire Google for $1,000,000.
That was not a good call. I wonder how many other missed opportunities those $3.8B had.
Do you think Yahoo made back what they paid for GeoCities based solely on the added value of GeoCities?
By the way, thanks for posting. It's always nice to hear from people who were there at the time.
By the way, thanks for posting. It's always nice to hear from people who were there at the time.
dilutive.
I worked for Tripod.com back in the day, which eventually sold to Lycos for about $60M, just a few months before Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.6B.
Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.
Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.
Thank you for being the only free host back then to give a 12-year old a sql server.
Remember Angelfire as well?
My first actually-online website was on Angelfire. I’ll never see it again, because:
1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity,
2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and
3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented character in its name, the entire operation failed — and deleted all of the data that was to be moved.)
1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity,
2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and
3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented character in its name, the entire operation failed — and deleted all of the data that was to be moved.)
What exactly did you have on this website?
Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is an act of war. :O!
Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is an act of war. :O!
Well, the oldest I had called “Kids’ Rave Book Reviews” — KRBR for short — and I had started off what I vaguely hoped to be a community project by posting my review of The Ear, The Eye, and the Arm, which I had just re-read in sixth grade.
It seems www.angelfire.com still exists in some sense... redirects to angelfire.lycos.com although it doesn't appear to be free.
Expages, anyone??
Remember Maxpages as well?
Ahhhh I am getting so nostalgic. Remember when the HTML marquee tag was a thing.
Oh man, my pokemon Maxpages sites. I wish they were still around. I used to go back and check on the sites of my 10 year old self.
I was more homestead.com
isp/~username was where the cool kids hung out.
This is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
Geocities time came and went, and I don't actually blame Yahoo for that (though I do blame them for the way in which it was shut down, lots of people lost their content forever, we didn't get everything out in time).
As a portal it failed because the basic concepts of free accounts and uploading made it a haven for spammers, as a commercial concept it failed because bulk display advertising rates dropped through the floor during the .com bust and in spite of losing money Yahoo kept it running for many years.
To 'fix' geocities would have meant grandfathering in a few million accounts, re-inventing the service in a way that would make it profitable against the rise of the new homepage provider: facebook.
I personally don't think that is something that they could have done, not with Yahoo's image and the legacy they were still hauling along. It needed a clean break with the past and ditching Geocities gave Yahoo an opportunity to do just that (which they then subsequently mostly wasted).
Yahoo did the right thing, but they went about it in a terribly callous way. All they had to do was to deny google crawling access to geocities, freeze the uploads, allow account archival and deletion in an automated way (easy for them to do). That way we wouldn't have this gaping hole in the web today, and we wouldn't have desperate people trying to find their old stuff through whatever means possible.
I'm sure 1 fte and a few hundred bucks worth of bandwidth would have been a price worth paying for Yahoo given the dent it gave their image, it definitely was worth paying that much to me to try to keep it running.
As a portal it failed because the basic concepts of free accounts and uploading made it a haven for spammers, as a commercial concept it failed because bulk display advertising rates dropped through the floor during the .com bust and in spite of losing money Yahoo kept it running for many years.
To 'fix' geocities would have meant grandfathering in a few million accounts, re-inventing the service in a way that would make it profitable against the rise of the new homepage provider: facebook.
I personally don't think that is something that they could have done, not with Yahoo's image and the legacy they were still hauling along. It needed a clean break with the past and ditching Geocities gave Yahoo an opportunity to do just that (which they then subsequently mostly wasted).
Yahoo did the right thing, but they went about it in a terribly callous way. All they had to do was to deny google crawling access to geocities, freeze the uploads, allow account archival and deletion in an automated way (easy for them to do). That way we wouldn't have this gaping hole in the web today, and we wouldn't have desperate people trying to find their old stuff through whatever means possible.
I'm sure 1 fte and a few hundred bucks worth of bandwidth would have been a price worth paying for Yahoo given the dent it gave their image, it definitely was worth paying that much to me to try to keep it running.
How is this relevant?
Different era. Different CEO. Different corporate culture. Different demography. Different way people use the internet. Vastly different size of users.
Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money.
I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
Different era. Different CEO. Different corporate culture. Different demography. Different way people use the internet. Vastly different size of users.
Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money.
I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
Please, not Yahoo! - the company that buys out great focused sites and stifles them, dilutes their focus and kill them through neglect.
Culture is same nevertheless, the top-level management culture ie.
intention = funny;
I really don't want Tumblr to be bought by Yahoo!
Last time a startup went in and was killed. Rumour has it that they halt the progress of things till it's no longer relevant to the real world and then kill it.
I really don't want Tumblr to be bought by Yahoo!
Last time a startup went in and was killed. Rumour has it that they halt the progress of things till it's no longer relevant to the real world and then kill it.
It would be really quite amazing if Yahoo acqui-hired Tumblr.
I know it'll never happen, but it's just funny to think, given their current trend for acqui-hires.
I know it'll never happen, but it's just funny to think, given their current trend for acqui-hires.
Geocities worked quite differently from Tumblr. How would you transition from one format to the other, without pissing off current users?
Because closing Geocities doesn't piss off current users? If you ask me, Yahoo! should just have done it and damn the consequences!
In fairness; regardless of what Yahoo! did with Geocities, they'd still end up buying Tumblr.
In fairness; regardless of what Yahoo! did with Geocities, they'd still end up buying Tumblr.
This wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least leverage Geocities a bit more than shutting it down:
Start Tumblr-style side venture. Pitch it to existing Geocities customers in various ways with advantages like shared logins and some semblance of import tool easing adoption. Let Tumblr roll on from that kick start. Eventually phase out or shut-down Geocities.
Start Tumblr-style side venture. Pitch it to existing Geocities customers in various ways with advantages like shared logins and some semblance of import tool easing adoption. Let Tumblr roll on from that kick start. Eventually phase out or shut-down Geocities.
That's a pretty big rumour - though it would give Yahoo a better foothold.
For the history books, Yahoo's M&A has been more trend-defining than anybody else.
Geocities in 1999 -- spawned the dot com rush
Flickr (2005) -- the official web 2.0 start date!
Tumblr (2013) -- ???
Geocities in 1999 -- spawned the dot com rush
Flickr (2005) -- the official web 2.0 start date!
Tumblr (2013) -- ???
" In a separate announcement, GeoCities posted a net loss of $8.4 million, or 27 cents a share, for the fourth quarter ended, compared with losses of $3 million, or 14 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue for the three month period rose 341 percent to $7.5 million. For the year, the company lost $19.8 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $8.9 million, or 44 cents a share, in 1997. "
and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses)
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses)
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
Ah Instagram, Facebook, twitter, tumblr... You really think that all the google ads you've seen in your life (let alone on a given site) add up to a return of $15? I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.
This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.
This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.
> I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad.
I really wish this was a more common attitude.
You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double.
Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.
I really wish this was a more common attitude.
You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double.
Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.
I don't understand why ad-driven companies don't offer an option for premium. I would lobby hard for Facebook if I could pay to preserve my privacy and not see ads.
The good ol' economic sense of the 90's...
Seems SV still has the same economic sense.
Seems SV still has the same economic sense.
Fun fact: the stock used to buy GeoCities would still be worth billions of dollars, even if the vesting/lock-in schedule was extraordinarily long.
Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, and ISPs. But it turned out that technological advancements erased a lot of the reasons why those things could be profitable (at least the way they were). Instead the next big things were search, web-apps, and social features (Web 2.0). Livejournal, blogger, flickr, google, google maps, etc. What people figured out, eventually, is that even if you have a million users that doesn't mean that it's easy to make even a million dollars a year.
Now, of course, there are lots of people who think they know what the "big thing" is, and companies are again shelling out billions for acquisitions, few of which will seem sensible in 10 years, or even 5.
Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, and ISPs. But it turned out that technological advancements erased a lot of the reasons why those things could be profitable (at least the way they were). Instead the next big things were search, web-apps, and social features (Web 2.0). Livejournal, blogger, flickr, google, google maps, etc. What people figured out, eventually, is that even if you have a million users that doesn't mean that it's easy to make even a million dollars a year.
Now, of course, there are lots of people who think they know what the "big thing" is, and companies are again shelling out billions for acquisitions, few of which will seem sensible in 10 years, or even 5.
What will the Instagram acquisition look like in 10 years time?
With the way FB's stock is going it will look cheaper and cheaper.
It already looks brilliant. Instagram now represents around 10% of FB users and Wall Street is assigning it a corresponding value of ~10% of the company i.e. over $6 Billion (just rough math to make a point).
Comparing one vastly overvalued company to another vastly overvalued company isn't going to help anyone.
I disagree FB is vastly overvalued. It's not undervalued but if they weren't producing real revenues and profits they would be worth ~what they have in the bank, like Zynga.
FB is vastly different from Zynga and its earnings are only a fraction of the total valuation, which is based on hopes and dreams more than anything else.
Please add the date at the end of the title in future; I was like, didn't this happen in [1999]?
AOL bought Bebo for $850M in 2008, and then sold it 2 years later for $10M:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo
...and Bebo filed for bankruptcy a couple of days ago: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/05/bebo-fi...
Wow, people can get super-rich off the internet! Let's all invest our money in internet companies!
I think this was part of what Larry Page was trying to get across yesterday after Google released a bunch of services that (potentially) trounced many hotly contested competing services.
There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
I guess I don't understand what Page was trying to communicate? That there is still room in this world for people to make a living, as long as Google decides they aren't interested in that market? Do we really need, for example, another music streaming service from Google/Facebook/Amazon when we already have _several_ excellent, focused, and competitive streaming services out there?
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
I think he was trying to say that current competition is incredibly trivial.
I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
I was pretty surprised when I loaded up the free trial of Google Music All Access and right off the bat it suggested some smart playlists that I really agree with. It took me weeks/months on other services to get that level of recommendations.
But that being said, I do have my music collection on Google Play Music and listen from there, so Google had a head start already.
But that being said, I do have my music collection on Google Play Music and listen from there, so Google had a head start already.
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Fred Wilson has a fantastic post on the funding story behind Geocities (wow, that guy's been around for a long time)
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/geocities.html
http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/geocities.html
wow, sounds like GeoCities is really going places. i hope it works out for them!
And the other two companys mentioned, Excite and AltaVista.
They sound like great places to work.
They sound like great places to work.
Not to mention ABN Amro, which was effectively bailed out and nationalised during the global financial crisis. If only AltaVista had been considered too big to fail...
I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
ABN was acquired by RBS, which then went bust and was bailed out for a bunch of reasons.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-s...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-s...
I was kind of surprised to discover a few months back that altavista.com still exists and is serving-up search results.
if anyone's feeling nostalgic, http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/
try amazon.com :)
try amazon.com :)
If you're really nostalgic you can still get the real thing; ReoCities [1] is an archive of GeoCities pages crawled before the service was shut down.
[1] http://www.reocities.com/neighborhoods/
[1] http://www.reocities.com/neighborhoods/
Geocities was my first website!
As long as no one ever sees it/knows it was me who made what was quite possibly the ugliest website in the world, all I'll have is fond memories.
As long as no one ever sees it/knows it was me who made what was quite possibly the ugliest website in the world, all I'll have is fond memories.
I had a Geocities site around 1999 and I remember that adverts started appearing on the site around that time. At first (if I remember correctly) it was opt-in, but then at some point they just started appearing anyway. Problem was, this was a long time ago when DOM-manipulation was not so easy, and with Geocities there was no common page template - and hence nowhere obvious to put adverts that would work for every geocities site. I think the solution they came up with was little floating pop-up windows that appeared over the top of the edges of the page. It looked ugly, and was also pretty buggy.
No one would make a blog/homepage site like Geocities these days without ringfencing somewhere to put the ads. How things have changed.
No one would make a blog/homepage site like Geocities these days without ringfencing somewhere to put the ads. How things have changed.
My guess is that it was worth it at that time. GeoCities was huuuge. It's where I started and many of the sites I would encounter at the time from search results were hosted on GeoCities. Ah, those were the days.
How could it have been worth it at that time? Look what happened!
> Look what happened!
.. it was poorly managed and basically left to die. Then almost a decade later it was recreated again by another company (Tumblr).
.. it was poorly managed and basically left to die. Then almost a decade later it was recreated again by another company (Tumblr).
It does not matter what something is worth today. Five years from now it could be gone. I doubt GeoCities was the first, and it certainly is not the last, to suffer that fate.
Oh, those heads days! That a "website" could be bought for $3bn+ prodded a lot of young employees to say "WTF, let me quite my job and make a website.com". I should know, because I was one of them.
I think that http://cnnfn.cnn.com/1998/06/08/technology/yahoo/ was a much more reasonable purchase. Though just think of how much more that company could have made if they had waited until the market became frothier!
(Don't worry, the founders in that deal are doing quite well for themselves now...)
(Don't worry, the founders in that deal are doing quite well for themselves now...)
That was fantastic. What the heck happened to Yahoo. They were awesome. They had the best search page/directory, they had the best webmail. Then one day they decide that they're a media company and all of the usefulness died and Google picked up right where Yahoo left off, with what? A good search engine and the best webmail.
That Aol, Yahoo, and Geocities were the top sites on the internet back then makes me wonder if we're now screwed out of the future innovation that might happen because our big 2, Google and Facebook, may be too big to fail (or at least fall), at least for a while.
This was a link where I just went straight to the commentary to see who else is old school.
I view this as mostly an execution issue from Yahoo. People were buying companies, but there were very few examples of good integration. Instagram actually is such an example.
I view this as mostly an execution issue from Yahoo. People were buying companies, but there were very few examples of good integration. Instagram actually is such an example.
What's interesting to me is that the advertisement is working. Backwards comparability!
While we're on the topic of Yahoo acquisitions in 1999, here's another: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/
God this brings back memories:
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-in...
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-in...
What this tells me is that current perceived bubble isn't nearly what the 1999 one was, which is a good sign. Yahoo better take care of Tumblr and put extensive resources behind it.
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Edit the title to not confuse people please.
I have to say, this really made me laugh pretty heartily, given the rumors of tumblr being bought by Yahoo.
yahoo was buying competition to do what Microsoft does but on the display advertising market.
microsoft and AOL were buying browsers trying to prevent people from reaching competition
man, I'm so glad for Mozilla! and even the unsung opera.
microsoft and AOL were buying browsers trying to prevent people from reaching competition
man, I'm so glad for Mozilla! and even the unsung opera.
I am amazed at how much web page designing progressed from 1999.
How much money would be GeoCities acquired today?
Ah the good old days!
gimme some of that internet money
It's been running for a few years now and gets approximately 35K unique visitors daily.
From a commercial point of view it is a complete failure but the emails from happy people that I keep getting about the project are more than enough payment.