How Beverly Hills Internet became a city of neighborhoods
The service started in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, a small Los Angeles company run by David Bohnett and John Rezner. It handed out free web space and did one thing no other host bothered with: it gave every page an address inside a themed neighborhood.
A science fiction page lived in Area 51. A celebrity fan page went to Hollywood. Programmers took SiliconValley, families took Heartland, and money pages went to WallStreet. The address told you what you were about to open, which mattered on a web that had no search engine worth using yet.
The company took the GeoCities name and the model worked fast. It signed its millionth "homesteader," the company word for a member, in October 1997. By December 1998, Media Metrix counted more than 19 million unique visitors in a month and ranked the site the third most trafficked on the web, behind only AOL and Yahoo.
That growth came from members building pages for each other and linking to their neighbors, the same loop MySpace would run on a bigger scale a few years later.
Why the first FTC internet privacy case named GeoCities
In August 1998, months before Yahoo made an offer, the company settled charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission. The agency said it had collected personal details through its membership form and passed them on while telling members the data was for something else.
"GeoCities misled its customers, both children and adults, by not telling the truth about how it was using their personal information," said Jodie Bernstein, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, in the agency's 1998 announcement.
The settlement carried no admission of wrongdoing. What it carried instead was a set of rules the rest of the web later inherited: post a clear privacy notice saying what is collected and who receives it, get parental consent before collecting anything from children 12 and under, and give members a way to have their details removed from third-party databases.
It was the FTC's first internet privacy case. The privacy policy link at the bottom of almost every page in 2026 traces back to a consent order about a free homepage service.
What Yahoo paid, and the protest that followed
Yahoo agreed to buy the company on January 28, 1999 in an all-stock deal valued at about $3.57 billion. Yahoo exchanged 21,640,342 of its own shares for the GeoCities stock it did not already hold. TechCrunch, looking back in 2009, put the value at closing lower, at $2.87 billion, because Yahoo shares moved between announcement and completion.
The trouble started with paperwork. Yahoo rewrote the terms of service in 1999 in language that appeared to hand it the right to reuse anything a member had posted, with no payment, credit or notice.
Members answered with a boycott that became known as the Haunting. They stripped their own pages back to bare backgrounds, deleted the animated GIFs and the visitor counters, and replaced the content with excerpts of the offending terms. Whole neighborhoods went grey at once.
Yahoo backed down inside a week and rewrote the terms to leave rights with the people who had made the pages. A user base had renegotiated a platform contract by refusing to use the platform, five years before Facebook existed.
Who owns GeoCities today?
The name belongs to Yahoo Inc., and Yahoo is owned by funds managed by affiliates of Apollo Global Management, which completed a roughly $5 billion purchase in September 2021. There is no product left for anyone to run. The brand is a dormant asset attached to a domain that serves no pages.
Yahoo announced the shutdown on April 23, 2009 and stopped taking new members that day. Traffic had already collapsed: comScore counted 11.5 million US unique visitors in March 2009, down 24 percent from 15.1 million a year earlier. The service went dark on October 26, 2009, and roughly 38 million member-built pages went with it.
Yahoo kept no copy. Members were told to download their own files if they wanted them, and old geocities.com addresses now bounce to a Yahoo page explaining that the service closed.
One outpost lasted a decade longer. Yahoo Japan ran its own version until March 31, 2019, blaming profitability and system problems, and that closure ended the service as a live product anywhere in the world.
How much of it did anyone manage to save?
Two rescue efforts ran at the same time. The Internet Archive ran deep crawls from July to October 2009, including sites nominated by the public, and serves those captures through the Wayback Machine as its GeoCities Special Collection.
Archive Team, a volunteer group co-founded by Jason Scott in 2009, ran its own harvest from April to October 2009 with dozens of people and hundreds of machine instances. In 2010 it published the result as a single 641 GB torrent, still the largest public block of this material anywhere.
Scott did not soften his view of what Yahoo had done. He told Time in 2009 that the site had been "the largest self-created folk-art collection in the history of the world," and that Yahoo "found the way to destroy the most massive amount of history in the shortest amount of time with absolutely no recourse."
Artists Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied then built something out of that torrent. Their project One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age began posting automated screenshots of rebuilt pages on February 7, 2013, one every twenty minutes, rendered in period-correct browsers. It has since been shown in galleries and treated as an art archive rather than a backup.
What replaced it for people who want a homepage?
The direct heir is Neocities, launched in 2013 by Kyle Drake with the stated goal of reviving the free web hosting that GeoCities used to provide. A free site gets 1 GB of storage and 200 GB of bandwidth, runs no server-side code, and by May 2026 the service had hosted more than 1,612,500 sites.
The bigger answer is that the audience moved. Squarespace, Wix and WordPress.com absorbed the people who wanted a presentable page, and social platforms absorbed everyone who only wanted somewhere to post. Both traded the handmade look for templates.
David Bohnett, who started the company, describes the loss as one of purpose rather than design. "GeoCities was not about self-promotion. It was about sharing your interest and your knowledge," he told Gizmodo in 2022. In the same interview he said what surprised him was "how far away we've gotten from that original intent."
A few pages from that era are still served at their original addresses, though every one of them is hosted somewhere else.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did GeoCities shut down?
Yahoo shut GeoCities down in the United States on October 26, 2009, six months after announcing the closure on April 23, 2009. Roughly 38 million member-built pages were deleted, and Yahoo kept no copy of them. Yahoo Japan ran a separate GeoCities until March 31, 2019, which was the last working version of the service anywhere.
Can you still see old GeoCities pages?
Yes. The Internet Archive crawled GeoCities from July to October 2009 and serves those captures through the Wayback Machine as its GeoCities Special Collection. Archive Team's parallel harvest, published in 2010 as a 641 GB torrent, holds more material again. Neither copy is complete, and the pages nobody ever linked to are the ones most likely missing.
How much did Yahoo pay for GeoCities?
Yahoo announced its purchase of GeoCities on January 28, 1999 at about $3.57 billion in stock, exchanging 21,640,342 Yahoo shares for the rest of the company. TechCrunch later put the value at closing at $2.87 billion, because Yahoo's share price moved between announcement and completion. Yahoo shut the service down ten years after buying it, in October 2009.