Yahoo Shuts Down Geocities
On Monday, Yahoo closed down GeoCities, their free hosting service they had purchased during the dot-com boom for more than three billion dollars.
In a message on their GeoCities website, Yahoo stated that they had enjoyed hosting Yahoo user created websites from around the world and were proud of the community they had built, but they had decided to focus on helping their customers explore as well as build online relationships in different ways.
Yahoo stated that after Monday GeoCities wouldn’t be available and recommended that refugees of GeoCities set their new online homes up at their paid hosting service. Yahoo has an introductory offer where the first twelve months of hosting costs only five dollars.
The shutdown of GeoCities took place a week after a report from Yahoo showed how their aggressive cost cutting had helped the company triple their net profit in spite of revenues declining by twelve percent during the third quarter.
According to Yahoo, their net profit increased by more 244 percent during the quarter, going from $186 million (13 cents a share), from last year’s $54 million (4 cents a share), which easily surpassed forecasts from analysts.
Their surprising performance was in large part due to the cost cutting measures that Carol Bartz implemented after being named to replace Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, as chief executive in January.
During the last year, the head count of Yahoo has been reduced by around 2,000 people. The company currently has approximately 13,200 employees.
Early this year, Yahoo announced they were planning to close down GeoCities, stating that in some areas they were increasing investment and scaling back others.
In 1994, GeoCities was formed with the name Beverly Hills Internet. Yahoo bought the company during Silicon Valley’s infamous dot-com boom.
GeoCities provided users with tools for building interactive websites. Chat forums and other community features were added later.
Yahoo added paid premium services, attempting to bring in revenues with GeoCities, which had difficulties keeping users and becoming profitable.
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