GeoCities

~ the rise ~

GeoCities was founded in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner under the name "Beverly Hills Internet." Within a year it had become GeoCities, organized into themed "neighborhoods", Hollywood for entertainment sites, SiliconValley for tech, Heartland for family pages, Athens for academia, Area51 for sci-fi, RodeoDrive for shopping. You picked a neighborhood. You got a free homepage. You decorated it.

By 1999 it was the third-most-visited website on the internet, behind only AOL and Yahoo. Yahoo bought it that year for $3.57 billion in stock. Ten years later, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo turned off all the lights and erased an estimated 38 million homepages from the web, but it was, and remains, the largest single-event content extinction in internet history.

~ on paper ~

~ the aesthetic ~

GeoCities had an aesthetic. It was indefensible. It was beautiful.

A GeoCities page in its peak form contained: a tiled background image (often a stretched JPEG of a galaxy or a brick wall), a large <marquee> banner sliding the page title left-to-right, an animated GIF of a flame torch or a spinning skull, a MIDI file of an Avril Lavigne song that autoplayed on entry, a "you are visitor #00432" hit counter, an under-construction GIF (a man with a hard hat shoveling dirt), several <font color="#FF00FF"> tags, a guestbook link that led to either glory or spam, and at the bottom of the page, a webring, "this site is part of the LinkinPark fanring, « previous · random · next »".

None of this had been designed by a graphic designer. None of it had been A/B tested. None of it followed brand guidelines, while each page looked exactly like the person who made it, a fourteen year old, alone in their bedroom, learning HTML for the first time, deciding that the most important thing in the world was that everyone know they loved Britney Spears.

~ how it ended ~

Yahoo killed GeoCities to save money, but the official statement said the platform "no longer fit Yahoo's strategy." The actual reason was that GeoCities had become a backwater, abandoned for blogs (Blogger, LiveJournal, then WordPress and Tumblr), then for social networks (MySpace, then Facebook). Maintaining 38 million dormant homepages cost Yahoo bandwidth without generating revenue.

What Yahoo failed to appreciate, and what they were criticised for at the time, is that GeoCities was a cultural archive, but those 38 million pages were the historical record of how regular people, not professionals, decided to present themselves on the internet for the first time. They were the equivalent of erasing the early years of zine culture or the first decade of personal television.

A volunteer group called the Archive Team frantically scraped what they could in the months before the shutdown. They saved an estimated 23TB of pages. Most of it now lives at Restorativland and the Internet Archive.

~ the hole it left ~

GeoCities was the last era when "having a homepage" was something a normal person did. After 2010, the verb shifted: you had a Facebook profile, then a Tumblr, then an Instagram, then a TikTok. Each one was someone else's container. Each one looked the same as everyone else's.

A GeoCities page took twenty hours of unpaid labor to build. It was hideous. It was unique. It belonged to the person who built it. There has been no widely-adopted internet medium since 2010 with that property.

The neighborhood metaphor was load-bearing. Putting your page in "Heartland/Meadows/8742" gave a young weird kid a sense that they had a place in a town. The shift to flat namespaces. Everyone's profile is just /username at the same domain. Took something away that we have not built a replacement for.

~ words from mourners ~

"my page was at /Hollywood/Studios/4429 and it had a fan-art gallery for buffy the vampire slayer. i made every gif in fireworks. i still have the.fla files in a box somewhere." - l.k. 41

"i learned html on geocities at age 11. i now write rust at a real company. they are the same skill, even if they pretend not to be.", b.ö. 39

"my under-construction sign has been animated for 26 years and the page is now in the wayback machine. that's longer than i've held any job.", m.r. 47