Yahoo paid $3.6 billion dollars for the biggest non-revenue-generating site on the internet–and they finally realized they weren’t going to make money on it?

For most of us web surfers, this is a good thing.   Geocity pages were cluttered with ads, and difficult to look at.  And for the most part, the content on those sites were better off in a more structured setup like a wiki, or blog. It once touted as its motto “Yahoo! GeoCities:  Get a web site with easy-to-use site building tools, ” but we all know that while Geocities was decent in its day, it is seriously behind the times, and lacked simplicity compared to other tools currently available.

It also appears that this is a push to force Geocities users to move to Yahoo’s paid hosting, which could be a boon-or-bust situation.  Typically, people who have always had something for free, will continue to have the mentality that it should remain free, and these people are difficult to convert.

It is interesting to note that Geocities currently ranks #2 in Google for “free web hosting,” but I imagine that people will be out shopping on Google for another free web host rather than upgrading to Yahoo’s paid hosting.  I guess Yahoo doesn’t need the PR they got from the free hosting, nor did they ever figure out a way to make money on free hosting, unlike many other free hosting companies in existence.  Not sure about you, but I think the banner ads on Geocities were always ignored.  Maybe they could have recovered it simply by running Adsense on it.

Feel free to read the rest of the Geocities shut down project.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 19th, 2009 at 3:14 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.