
Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999) - pain_perdu
http://money.cnn.com/1999/01/28/technology/yahoo_a/
======
jacquesm
If you had a site on geocities you can probably still get it from either the
Archive team torrent or from <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.

~~~
gman99
Not 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.

~~~
jacquesm
I am really sorry, unfortunately it is pretty safe to assume the data is long
gone unless one of the other preservation efforts snagged it.

I have very long list of wanted sites but only a handful of those were
recovered in the last year (mostly from local caches on old pc's).

I don't think the archive will every be completed.

~~~
gman99
No need to be sorry. Thanks for setting the service up and trying! I'm sure
it's helped lots of people.

As for my site; I'm sure I have backup's (somewhere :) of the really valuable
data. It's just more for taking a look at My First Website and reeling at the
horror more than anything else.

------
dougjoe
i 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...

~~~
pitchups
>> how about the Broadcast.com deal? Billions for a bunch of servers... Well,
it certainly made Mark Cuban a billionaire, if nothing else!

------
dewitt
I 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
Remember Angelfire as well?

~~~
Y0L0
Remember Maxpages as well?

~~~
viraj_shah
Ahhhh I am getting so nostalgic. Remember when the HTML marquee tag was a
thing.

------
hristov
This 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.

~~~
pavs
How 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.

~~~
duaneb
Relevant and different are not mutually exclusive.

~~~
pavs
Its not relevant because there are different circumstances. Not because they
are different.

------
gingerlime
_" 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.

~~~
duaneb
Ah 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
> 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
I don't understand why ad-driven companies don't offer an option for premium.
I would lobby hard for Facebook if I could pay to preserve my privacy and not
see ads.

------
InclinedPlane
Fun 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
What will the Instagram acquisition look like in 10 years time?

~~~
wilfra
It 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
Comparing one vastly overvalued company to another vastly overvalued company
isn't going to help anyone.

~~~
wilfra
I 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.

~~~
mratzloff
FB is vastly different from Zynga and its earnings are only a fraction of the
total valuation, which is based on hopes and dreams more than anything else.

------
yskchu
Please add the date at the end of the title in future; I was like, didn't this
happen in [1999]?

------
everettForth
AOL bought Bebo for $850M in 2008, and then sold it 2 years later for $10M:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bebo>

~~~
kwestro
...and Bebo filed for bankruptcy a couple of days ago:
[http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/05/bebo-
fi...](http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2013/05/bebo-files-for-
chapter-11-bankruptcy.html)

------
minimaxir
Wow, people can get super-rich off the internet! Let's all invest our money in
internet companies!

~~~
psbp
I 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
I 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
I 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
I 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.

------
sriramk
Fred 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>

------
leeoniya
wow, sounds like GeoCities is really going places. i hope it works out for
them!

~~~
jussij
And the other two companys mentioned, Excite and AltaVista.

They sound like great places to work.

~~~
JacobAldridge
Not 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
ABN 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-s...](http://www.guardian.co.uk/global/2011/dec/12/royal-bank-of-scotland-
fsa-report)

------
justhw
Honest question, what would Yahoo do with Tumblr if they were to acquire it?

~~~
smegel
Try and build a social network probably. Its a massive omission in their
portfolio, especially as G+ is finally starting to gain traction.

------
leeoniya
if anyone's feeling nostalgic, <http://wonder-tonic.com/geocitiesizer/>

try amazon.com :)

~~~
mambodog
If 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/>

------
pbreit
It 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
Got to love those bubbles.

------
jebeng
Geocities 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.

~~~
jasey
Same 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
I listen to Justin Timberlake now, 4th grade me would be disgusted.

------
codeulike
I 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.

------
yogo
My 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
How could it have been worth it at that time? Look what happened!

~~~
markdown
> 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).

------
untotal
Oh, 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
did you get rich? :)

~~~
dredmorbius
Based on username, not.

------
circa
I 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
Xoom, Hypermart and Homestead were a couple I remember using.

------
btilly
I think that <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...)

------
dangayle
That 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.

------
ISL
1999!

------
kvee
That 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.

------
mathattack
This 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.

------
jeep
What's interesting to me is that the advertisement is working. Backwards
comparability!

------
srhngpr
While we're on the topic of Yahoo acquisitions in 1999, here's another:
<http://money.cnn.com/1999/04/01/deals/yahoo/>

------
rrc
God this brings back memories:

[http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-
in...](http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/popular-search-engines-in-
the-90s-then-and-now/)

------
tommaxwell
What 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.

------
suyash
Edit the title to not confuse people please.

------
steven2012
I have to say, this really made me laugh pretty heartily, given the rumors of
tumblr being bought by Yahoo.

------
gcb0
yahoo 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.

------
nu2ycombinator
I am amazed at how much web page designing progressed from 1999.

------
meerita
How much money would be GeoCities acquired today?

------
gdonelli
Ah the good old days!

------
dmead
gimme some of that internet money

