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Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)
- minimaxir 13y agoWow, people can get super-rich off the internet! Let's all invest our money in internet companies!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- psbp 13y agoI think this was part of what Larry Page was trying to get across yesterday after Google released a bunch of services that (potentially) trounced many hotly contested competing services. There's been a lot of billions thrown around over some relatively uninspired ideas and it seems like a concerted attempt to create a false, easily manipulated, bubbly marketplace.
- wavefunction 13y agoI guess I don't understand what Page was trying to communicate? That there is still room in this world for people to make a living, as long as Google decides they aren't interested in that market? Do we really need, for example, another music streaming service from Google/Facebook/Amazon when we already have _several_ excellent, focused, and competitive streaming services out there? IMNSHO DoJ needs to hit Google and the rest of these 800lb gorillas very hard with the anti-trust stick...
- psbp 13y agoI think he was trying to say that current competition is incredibly trivial. I think the Google streaming service utilizes Google's ability to personalize tastes pretty well. At least, so far, it's exceeded my Spotify and Rdio experiences.
- freehunter 13y agoI was pretty surprised when I loaded up the free trial of Google Music All Access and right off the bat it suggested some smart playlists that I really agree with. It took me weeks/months on other services to get that level of recommendations. But that being said, I do have my music collection on Google Play Music and listen from there, so Google had a head start already.
- yogo 13y agoMy guess is that it was worth it at that time. GeoCities was huuuge. It's where I started and many of the sites I would encounter at the time from search results were hosted on GeoCities. Ah, those were the days.
- derrida 13y agoHow could it have been worth it at that time? Look what happened!
- markdown 13y ago> Look what happened! .. it was poorly managed and basically left to die. Then almost a decade later it was recreated again by another company (Tumblr).
- yogo 13y agoIt does not matter what something is worth today. Five years from now it could be gone. I doubt GeoCities was the first, and it certainly is not the last, to suffer that fate.
- ISL 13y ago1999!
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- justhw 13y agoHonest question, what would Yahoo do with Tumblr if they were to acquire it?
- smegel 13y agoTry and build a social network probably. Its a massive omission in their portfolio, especially as G+ is finally starting to gain traction.
- hristov 13y agoThis is very relevant now because rumors are that Yahoo is about to buy Tumblr for over a billion dollars. If they only took care of Geocities they would not have to buy it all over again in Tumblr form.
- eurleif 13y agoGeocities worked quite differently from Tumblr. How would you transition from one format to the other, without pissing off current users?
- Svip 13y agoBecause closing Geocities doesn't piss off current users? If you ask me, Yahoo! should just have done it and damn the consequences! In fairness; regardless of what Yahoo! did with Geocities, they'd still end up buying Tumblr.
- prawn 13y agoThis wouldn't be perfect, but it would at least leverage Geocities a bit more than shutting it down: Start Tumblr-style side venture. Pitch it to existing Geocities customers in various ways with advantages like shared logins and some semblance of import tool easing adoption. Let Tumblr roll on from that kick start. Eventually phase out or shut-down Geocities.
- pavs 13y agoHow is this relevant? Different era. Different CEO. Different corporate culture. Different demography. Different way people use the internet. Vastly different size of users. Tumblr could very well die on its own without anyone's help. Last I heard it was not making any profit yet, and took huge amount of money from investors. In the long term, investors don't care how many users you have if you are not making much money. I personally want tech industry to get away from 2-3 companies dominating. I want a new challenger, that could be yahoo (we don't know yet), but I am willing to give them the benefit of doubt; and a chance to prove themselves under new leadership.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- everettForth 13y agoAOL bought Bebo for $850M in 2008, and then sold it 2 years later for $10M: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo
- kwestro 13y ago...and Bebo filed for bankruptcy a couple of days ago: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/05/bebo-files-for-chapter-11-bankruptcy.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/05/bebo-fi...
- leeoniya 13y agowow, sounds like GeoCities is really going places. i hope it works out for them!
- jussij 13y agoAnd the other two companys mentioned, Excite and AltaVista. They sound like great places to work.
- JacobAldridge 13y agoNot to mention ABN Amro, which was effectively bailed out and nationalised during the global financial crisis. If only AltaVista had been considered too big to fail... I say "effectively", because the many mergers and splits it went through in the 00s meant the large parts nationalise in the Netherland and the UK were not identical to what it was in '99 when this analyst was interviewed.
- swombat 13y agoABN was acquired by RBS, which then went bust and was bailed out for a bunch of reasons. http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-scotland-fsa-report http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-s...
- andyjohnson0 13y agoI was kind of surprised to discover a few months back that altavista.com still exists and is serving-up search results.
- dewitt 13y agoI worked for Tripod.com back in the day, which eventually sold to Lycos for about $60M, just a few months before Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.6B. Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.
- viraj_shah 13y agoRemember Angelfire as well?
- Y0L0 13y agoRemember Maxpages as well?
- viraj_shah 13y agoAhhhh I am getting so nostalgic. Remember when the HTML marquee tag was a thing.
- d23 13y agoOh man, my pokemon Maxpages sites. I wish they were still around. I used to go back and check on the sites of my 10 year old self.
- theycallmemorty 13y agoIt seems www.angelfire.com still exists in some sense... redirects to angelfire.lycos.com although it doesn't appear to be free.
- aitkin 13y agoExpages, anyone??
- thomasvendetta 13y agoHolla: http://web.archive.org/web/20010124071800/http://expage.com/thomasvendetta http://web.archive.org/web/20010124071800/http://expage.com/...
- yskchu 13y agoPlease add the date at the end of the title in future; I was like, didn't this happen in [1999]?
- pbreit 13y agoIt should be noted that Geocities was a public company at the time with a market cap of $2.3b. But also that it generated only $7.5m in revenue the prior quarter.
- jussij 13y agoGot to love those bubbles.
- tommaxwell 13y agoWhat this tells me is that current perceived bubble isn't nearly what the 1999 one was, which is a good sign. Yahoo better take care of Tumblr and put extensive resources behind it.
- dmead 13y agogimme some of that internet money
- jeep 13y agoWhat's interesting to me is that the advertisement is working. Backwards comparability!
- suyash 13y agoEdit the title to not confuse people please.
- suyash 13y agoEdit the title to not confuse people please.
- steven2012 13y agoI have to say, this really made me laugh pretty heartily, given the rumors of tumblr being bought by Yahoo.
- jebeng 13y agoGeocities was my first website! As long as no one ever sees it/knows it was me who made what was quite possibly the ugliest website in the world, all I'll have is fond memories.
- whyleyc 13y agoCongrats on the sale ! Have you got any of the $3.6 billion left ?
- jebeng 13y agoNo, I put in it all in to pets.com and beenz unfourunately. :(
- jasey 13y agoSame with me. I made a Limp bizkit fan site over several lunch times in high school. I don't know what is more embarrassing, being a limpbizkit fan or using lunch breaks to create websites...
- duaneb 13y agoI listen to Justin Timberlake now, 4th grade me would be disgusted.
- leeoniya 13y agoif anyone's feeling nostalgic, http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/ try amazon.com :)
- mambodog 13y agoIf you're really nostalgic you can still get the real thing; ReoCities [1] is an archive of GeoCities pages crawled before the service was shut down. [1] http://www.reocities.com/neighborhoods/ http://www.reocities.com/neighborhoods/
- srhngpr 13y agoWhile we're on the topic of Yahoo acquisitions in 1999, here's another: http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/ http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/
- dougjoe 13y agoi was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers...
- indubitably 13y agodilutive.
- pitchups 13y ago>> how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers... Well, it certainly made Mark Cuban a billionaire, if nothing else!
- mratzloff 13y agoDo you think Yahoo made back what they paid for GeoCities based solely on the added value of GeoCities? By the way, thanks for posting. It's always nice to hear from people who were there at the time.
- VikingCoder 13y agoYou're forgetting the opportunity cost to buy other things. In 1997, Yahoo turned down the offer to acquire Google for $1,000,000. That was not a good call. I wonder how many other missed opportunities those $3.8B had.
- untotal 13y agoOh, those heads days! That a "website" could be bought for $3bn+ prodded a lot of young employees to say "WTF, let me quite my job and make a website.com". I should know, because I was one of them.
- citricsquid 13y agodid you get rich? :)
- dredmorbius 13y agoBased on username, not.
- kvee 13y agoThat Aol, Yahoo, and Geocities were the top sites on the internet back then makes me wonder if we're now screwed out of the future innovation that might happen because our big 2, Google and Facebook, may be too big to fail (or at least fall), at least for a while.
- gingerlime 13y ago" In a separate announcement, GeoCities posted a net loss of $8.4 million, or 27 cents a share, for the fourth quarter ended, compared with losses of $3 million, or 14 cents a share in the year-ago period. Revenue for the three month period rose 341 percent to $7.5 million. For the year, the company lost $19.8 million, or 71 cents per share, compared to a net loss of $8.9 million, or 44 cents a share, in 1997. " and bought for $3.57 billion... With 19 million unique visitors per month, or 228 million per year, you'd need to generate revenue of $15 from each of those _visitors_ on average to just return the investment... (not accounting for the losses) The good ol' economic sense of the 90's... That said, hindsight is always so 20:20.
- orangethirty 13y agoThe good ol' economic sense of the 90's... Seems SV still has the same economic sense.
- duaneb 13y agoAh Instagram, Facebook, twitter, tumblr... You really think that all the google ads you've seen in your life (let alone on a given site) add up to a return of $15? I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad. This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.
- Kequc 13y ago> I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad. I really wish this was a more common attitude. You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double. Imagine you pay $5 for every 10,000 page views on previously adverted sites and the money was distributed among those websites you visited.
- duaneb 13y ago
- gdonelli 13y agoAh the good old days!
- btilly 13y agoI think that http://cnnfn.cnn.com/1998/06/08/technology/yahoo/ http://cnnfn.cnn.com/1998/06/08/technology/yahoo/ was a much more reasonable purchase. Though just think of how much more that company could have made if they had waited until the market became frothier! (Don't worry, the founders in that deal are doing quite well for themselves now...)
- jacquesm 13y agoIf you had a site on geocities you can probably still get it from either the Archive team torrent or from http://reocities.com/ http://reocities.com/ , simply append your old url. There is a 'self service' bit (see the FAQ) where you can archive your website and have a download link mailed to you. It's been running for a few years now and gets approximately 35K unique visitors daily. From a commercial point of view it is a complete failure but the emails from happy people that I keep getting about the project are more than enough payment.
- Sprint 13y agoHow much does it cost you to host it? How do you host it (from compressed archives)?
- jacquesm 13y agoIt's all static, no compression (just one large xfs file tree), it costs a few hundred euros per month. At the time the server (20T) was quite expensive, one of these days it will have to be re-done and fortunately storage costs have come down quite a bit so the per-month write off on the server will be (a lot) lower.
- Sprint 13y agoOh I wish I had that much money for side projects. You could save a lot of space by hosting from a compressed filesystem or compressed archives (eg through avfs) at the cost of some CPU cycles.
- gman99 13y agoNot sure if this is the best place to ask, but I get a "page not found (yet)" (when I attempt to get to my old site) which suggests that you're still in the process of restoring pages. Is this still the case? Or do I assume that my data is long gone at this point. Edit: Even if my data is gone, I really appreciate what you've done; and I'm sure others do too. Wish Yahoo had shuttered it more gracefully.
- nu2ycombinator 13y agoI am amazed at how much web page designing progressed from 1999.
- meerita 13y agoHow much money would be GeoCities acquired today?
- InclinedPlane 13y agoFun fact: the stock used to buy GeoCities would still be worth billions of dollars, even if the vesting/lock-in schedule was extraordinarily long. Anyway, the interesting thing about a lot of the big late '90s dot-com acquisitions that now look like sheer insanity is that they were all a product of everyone latching onto what they thought the current "big thing" was. Back then it was portals, aggregation, hosting, and ISPs. But it turned out that technological advancements erased a lot of the reasons why those things could be profitable (at least the way they were). Instead the next big things were search, web-apps, and social features (Web 2.0). Livejournal, blogger, flickr, google, google maps, etc. What people figured out, eventually, is that even if you have a million users that doesn't mean that it's easy to make even a million dollars a year. Now, of course, there are lots of people who think they know what the "big thing" is, and companies are again shelling out billions for acquisitions, few of which will seem sensible in 10 years, or even 5.
- chris_wot 13y agoWhat will the Instagram acquisition look like in 10 years time?
- wilfra 13y agoIt already looks brilliant. Instagram now represents around 10% of FB users and Wall Street is assigning it a corresponding value of ~10% of the company i.e. over $6 Billion (just rough math to make a point).
- UVB-76 13y agoComparing one vastly overvalued company to another vastly overvalued company isn't going to help anyone.
- wilfra 13y agoI disagree FB is vastly overvalued. It's not undervalued but if they weren't producing real revenues and profits they would be worth ~what they have in the bank, like Zynga.
- sriramk 13y agoFred Wilson has a fantastic post on the funding story behind Geocities (wow, that guy's been around for a long time) http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/geocities.html http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2009/04/geocities.html
- mathattack 13y agoThis was a link where I just went straight to the commentary to see who else is old school. I view this as mostly an execution issue from Yahoo. People were buying companies, but there were very few examples of good integration. Instagram actually is such an example.
- codeulike 13y agoI had a Geocities site around 1999 and I remember that adverts started appearing on the site around that time. At first (if I remember correctly) it was opt-in, but then at some point they just started appearing anyway. Problem was, this was a long time ago when DOM-manipulation was not so easy, and with Geocities there was no common page template - and hence nowhere obvious to put adverts that would work for every geocities site. I think the solution they came up with was little floating pop-up windows that appeared over the top of the edges of the page. It looked ugly, and was also pretty buggy. No one would make a blog/homepage site like Geocities these days without ringfencing somewhere to put the ads. How things have changed.
- circa 13y agoI am trying to think of the others like GeoCities. all I can think of is Tripod, Angelfire, and members.aol.com pages. there were a bunch of others back in the day.
- jboots 13y agoXoom, Hypermart and Homestead were a couple I remember using.
- gcb0 13y agoyahoo was buying competition to do what Microsoft does but on the display advertising market. microsoft and AOL were buying browsers trying to prevent people from reaching competition man, I'm so glad for Mozilla! and even the unsung opera.
- rrc 13y agoGod this brings back memories: http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-in-the-90s-then-and-now/ http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-in...
- dangayle 13y agoThat was fantastic. What the heck happened to Yahoo. They were awesome. They had the best search page/directory, they had the best webmail. Then one day they decide that they're a media company and all of the usefulness died and Google picked up right where Yahoo left off, with what? A good search engine and the best webmail.