Believe it or not, a company that is clearly hungry for traffic and pages to populate with ads -- given its 15% revenue slide
this past quarter -- is axing a source of free content generation.
GeoCities has stopped taking in new registrations, and is advising
existing users to move out before the bulldozers come in later this
year.
As anyone who has surfed through GeoCities over the years will tell
you, an Internet without GeoCities is like a world of celluloid without
Keanu Reeves flicks. The absence of GeoCities won't create a cultural
void. Few will miss its passing. It's loaded mostly with hobbyist
tribute pages, authored by penny-pinching cybersurfers who put up with
primitive tools and gaudy ads in exchange for free hosting. Many of the
pages were created years ago, and abandoned like bunny rabbits after
Easter Sunday, Ugg boots after winter, and anything Reeves did after the first Matrix movie.
Let's not harp on the fact that Yahoo! acquired GeoCities 10 years
ago in a deal originally valued at $3.6 billion -- on the pricey side
of the dot-com bubble. Everyone was overpaying at the time.
Yahoo!'s real crime was in neglecting its costly municipality.
Instead of making GeoCities more attractive and fleshing out its
potential as a social destination for niche audiences, Yahoo! appears
to have dusted it under the rug as it moved to sell commercial hosting
services instead.
Stupid, right? The guy in GeoCities who is showing off his
collection of hissing Madagascar cockroaches or the YMCA basketball
coach posting game-day snapshots is never going to upgrade to a paid
hosting plan. However, a site like GeoCities can still nurture loyalty
from its authors and appreciation from folks who stumble on sites put
up by like-minded souls. That has to be worth something, right?
Killing GeoCities is just an invitation for bad karma, even if it's
already clear that Yahoo! did something to anger the gods several years
ago.
Time Warner 's (NYSE: TWX) AOL pulled a similar
stunt last fall, when it killed the personal member pages that offered
ad-free online space to its paying subscribers. AOL's move is probably
more vile, since it was just one of the many features scrapped for folks actually paying to be a member.
Unfortunately, it's not just Time Warner and AOL. Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) ceased development of Google Notebook earlier this year. Homestead was another popular free host. It has gone through the hands of United Online (Nasdaq: UNTD) and is now a premium hosting service under Intuit 's (Nasdaq: INTU) watch.
One can always argue that free hosting through gaudy templates is
irrelevant in a Web 2.0 world. Social networking sites like Facebook
and News Corp. 's (NYSE: NWS) MySpace offer free
strutting space, excelling in the sticky socialization that Internet
pioneers failed to grasp. As photo-sharing sites like Kodak
's (NYSE: EK) Gallery install tollbooths, sites like Facebook and
Flickr have evolved into the new leaders for displaying digital
snapshots.
This is still no excuse for killing GeoCities. Then again, maybe if
Yahoo! had taken a little more time to pick up the trash over the past
decade, it wouldn't be trashing the place.
More tapping the snooze bar at Yahoo!:
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© 2009 UCLICK, L.L.C.
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