WhereIsAtlas · Tech

GeoCities

The 1990s home of free personal homepages and colorful "neighborhoods" — shut down by Yahoo in 2009

Defunct — GeoCities let millions of people build free personal web pages in the 1990s. Yahoo bought it for billions in 1999, then closed the service in 2009 and deleted the content — much of which the Internet Archive stepped in to preserve.

GeoCities was founded in 1994 in Beverly Hills and became one of the defining services of the early web. Its pitch was simple and irresistible: give ordinary people free web space to build a personal homepage. Even more memorably, pages were organized into themed "neighborhoods," each named for a pastime or interest, so a user's address read something like a physical location.

At its peak GeoCities was one of the most-visited places on the internet, with millions of amateur sites covering everything from fan pages to personal diaries and business experiments. For many, it was the first way to publish anything on the web at all.

In 1999 Yahoo acquired GeoCities in a landmark deal worth billions. But the service struggled to make money, and in April 2009 Yahoo shut it down in the United States, deleting the content of millions of pages. The Internet Archive reacted by collecting and preserving a large record of the vanished sites.

Quick facts

Founded
1994, Beverly Hills, California
The idea
Free personal homepages in themed "neighborhoods"
Acquired
By Yahoo in 1999 (~$3.6 billion)
Shut down
April 2009 (US), June 2009 (Japan)
Preserved by
The Internet Archive
Legacy
The original era of amateur homepages

Lineage — where the name went

A Beverly Hills web host renamed into a neighborhood, sold to Yahoo at the top of the bubble, deleted in 2009 — and pieced back together afterwards by volunteers.

  1. 1994 — David Bohnett founded Beverly Hills Internet (with John Rezner, in Beverly Hills)
  2. 1994 — John Rezner founded Beverly Hills Internet (co-founder alongside Bohnett)
  3. 1995 — Beverly Hills Internet rebranded as GeoCities (the name changed on 15 December 1995, after a spell as Geopages)
  4. 1998 — GeoCities created The 1998 IPO (Nasdaq ticker GCTY)
  5. 1999 — Yahoo acquired GeoCities ($3.57 billion in stock, announced 28 January 1999; control taken 28 May 1999)
  6. 2009 — Yahoo created The 2009 shutdown (announced 23 April 2009 and closed on 26 October 2009, not in April)
  7. 2009 — The 2009 shutdown created The Internet Archive (the Internet Archive promised a thorough record of the pages before they went)
  8. 2010 — The Internet Archive created The Archive Team torrent (Archive Team released roughly 900 GB of data, compressed to 641 GB)
  9. 2009 — The 2009 shutdown created Reocities and geocities.ws (volunteers copied as much as they could before the content was deleted)
  10. GeoCities sibling-of GeoCities Japan (the Japanese service was run separately and outlived the US version by ten years)

Entities in this tree: David Bohnett (person); John Rezner (person); Beverly Hills Internet (company, 1994); GeoCities (company, 1995); The 1998 IPO (event, 1998); Yahoo (company, 1994); The 2009 shutdown (event, 2009); The Internet Archive (company); The Archive Team torrent (event, 2010); Reocities and geocities.ws (brand); GeoCities Japan (brand, 2019)

Sources

  1. GeoCities - Wikipedia — Wikipedia (2026-09-05)
  2. GeoCities, Preserved! — Internet Archive Blog (2026-09-05)

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