Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
money.cnn.com
money.cnn.com
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Awesome job!
(I was a co-founder of Homestead.)
By the way, thanks for posting. It's always nice to hear from people who were there at the time.
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.
Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.
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.)
Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is an act of war. :O!
In fairness; regardless of what Yahoo! did with Geocities, they'd still end up buying Tumblr.
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.
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.
Geocities in 1999 -- spawned the dot com rush
Flickr (2005) -- the official web 2.0 start date!
Tumblr (2013) -- ???
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.
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 know it'll never happen, but it's just funny to think, given their current trend for acqui-hires.
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.
Seems SV still has the same economic sense.
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 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.
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.
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.
IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
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.
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.
They sound like great places to work.
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.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-s...
try amazon.com :)
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.
Have you got any of the $3.6 billion left ?
I made a Limp bizkit fan site over several lunch times in high school.
I don't know what is more embarrassing, being a limpbizkit fan or using lunch breaks to create websites...
No one would make a blog/homepage site like Geocities these days without ringfencing somewhere to put the ads. How things have changed.
.. it was poorly managed and basically left to die. Then almost a decade later it was recreated again by another company (Tumblr).
(Don't worry, the founders in that deal are doing quite well for themselves now...)
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.
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-in...
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.