The reasons as to why Yahoo! dropped the ball with Geocities will be a great debate over the next year or so.  However, I feel the main reason Geocities ended up fading off into the sunset is that Yahoo failed to evolve the product into what people needed.

Did Shared Hosting Kill Geocities?

In 2008, according to a survey by Compete.com, the domain geocities.com attracted at least 177 million visitors annually.  So with those numbers, how could they go wrong?  You can not argue the point that the lowering in price of shared hosting accounts made the Geocities hosting look less favorable.  Users could pay as low as $4 or $5 a month and get a lot more than they were getting from Geocities with a shared web hosting provider.  Free hosting might be totally obsolete these days.

Did MySpace or Facebook Kill Geocities?

Many are even saying that Geocities could have easily evolved into a Facebook or MySpace.  Looking back at the original Geocities, it was all about community and sharing your pages with others.  This is much like it is today, except badly designed free sites have been replaced with goofy zombie versus pirates or mafia wars games.

Did Yahoo! Kill Geocities?

In 2001, Yahoo decided to start offering a “premium” version of the Geocities product.  To give users something to pay for and upgrade to, they had to turn on the free hosting service.  This is when they started to limit the monthly data transfer or bandwidth to the free Geocities users.  Following that, Geocities was just another free hosting service.  Nothing more.

Yahoo!’s overall feeling towards the Geocities free users was distain and disgust.  They failed to realize or even try to turn the direction on the proverbial Titanic in front of them.  Could Yahoo! of saved Geocities?  Maybe they could have or possibly they could have killed it off sooner than now.  However, at least then we would be left with a general feeling they at least tried.

Be sure to catch the rest of our Geocities Tribute on Podcast 186 of the Web Hosting Show!