From “one of our 29 neighborhoods”
to “no longer available”

The 1996 homepage puts a member's page in the middle of the screen. Today's Cool Homestead is HotSprings 1837, introduced like this: So you hit the snooze bar ten times every morning. You might be lazy. But then again, you might have a sleep disorder.

HotSprings 1837 is an address. On GeoCities you picked a themed neighborhood, then a spot on a drawn street. Founder David Bohnett described it years later: you'd kind of pick your address on the street^[1]. The company had started in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet, hosting websites for businesses^[1].

The rest of the page is news from the city. Grogg, the Internet's only Neanderthal advice columnist, appears this week on the GeoCities Mainstage, the SiliconValley neighborhood hosts a Microsoft NetMeeting tool that lets GeoCitizens chat and share a whiteboard, and a boxed ad sells GeoPlus, the paid membership: Use up to 10MB for your site. Earn double GeoPoints. Near the bottom, a job ad: Advertising Traffic Manager wanted.

By July 2, 1997 the same margin text says one of our 37 neighborhoods today. A blue line under the banner adds a count of people: 735,000 members and growing...

Today's Cool Homestead lives at Area51/Vault6963, and the blurb is one sentence long: You are welcome to tip the cows at the Official Cow-Tipping Homepage. The page also announces TWO COOL TOOLS for members. One is a guestbook (GeoCities now has its own guestbook), and the other is the GeoGuide, a navigational aid to put on your own pages, with a chance to win a new computer.

The left column has a small-print preference: GeoCities is best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer, with a Download MSIE now link under the badge. Above the banner, an ad reads Win a 3000GT VR-4 from Surplus Direct!!

In July 1998 the browser tab reads GeoCities - The Largest Community on the Web! The middle of the page is Explore Our GeoAvenues, 14 topics from Arts & Literature to Women, each with three or four sub-links. The word neighborhood survives only as a link, in the top navigation and the footer. Above the avenues sit four banner tiles: Amazon for books, Surplus Direct for computers, CDnow for music and a First USA credit card.

An earlier capture, from January 23, 1998, still shows the street-level homepage. Its counter says 1.3 MILLION members, and its Cool Homestead of the Day is a page at Heartland/Meadows/1259: Fathers can share their feelings about divorce at Divorced Dads.

The July sidebar is chattier. A GeoPoll asks Which gender do you prefer your boss to be? The Leader of the Month box begins We wish we had dozens of GeoDivas! At the bottom sit a Privacy Statement link and a TRUSTe badge.

Signing up for those free pages meant filling in a form. In August 1998 the Federal Trade Commission announced a settlement with GeoCities and called it the first FTC case involving Internet privacy^[3]. The agency said GeoCities had misrepresented why it collected the information.

According to the FTC, the registration process built a database with e-mail and postal addresses, interests, and income, education, gender, marital status and occupation^[3]. The same release counts over 2 million members. The proposed settlement would require parental consent before collecting information from children aged 12 and under^[3]. It was a settlement of charges, not a court ruling.

On September 10, 1999 the logo reads Yahoo! GeoCities, with a small house at the end of the name. Three blue buttons fill the top of the GeoCities homepage: Build a Page, Edit Pages, Upload Files. A line under them is for longtime residents: Returning GeoCities members, learn how to sign in for the first time. The neighborhoods are still here, and a link invites you to Take a vacation in TheTropics, one of our 41 Neighborhoods.

Yahoo announced the deal on January 28, 1999, for about $3.56 billion in stock, WIRED reported, with GeoCities at 3.5 million members^[4]. It closed on May 28^[5]. The footer of our September capture already reads Copyright © 1994-1999 Yahoo! Inc.

In June and July 1999 members protested Yahoo's new terms of use, whose copyright clauses, they said, took away control of their own pages^[7].

Some users turned their pages gray or simply abandoned their sites, WIRED reported^[6]. Yahoo revised the terms, and by July 10 the organizers said all is now well^[6].

The June 2000 GeoCities homepage still ranks its neighborhoods. Its Most Popular list runs from Hollywood (film & TV) and WallStreet (investing/finance) through South Beach (hanging out) and Heartland (family values) to Tokyo (animé/Asian culture). The box counts 41 themed communities, the same number as in 1999.

The center of the page now builds the page for you: Let us build a web page for you... over three templates called Photo Page, Fun D'Mental and Night Vision. In the HTML, the Night Vision picture's alt text says Classic Tan. Same picture, two names. Along the bottom runs a long strip of Yahoo services that starts Address Book · Alerts · Auctions · Bill Pay.

A year later the word neighborhood doesn't appear anywhere on the GeoCities homepage. Not once. Member pages are found through Search or Browse Our Directory, 15 topics such as Business & Finance and Health & Wellness, and you may Add up to three pages to it. One sub-link under Family & Home is spelled Geneology; the 1998 GeoAvenues had it right, Genealogy.

In June 2002 the largest box on the GeoCities homepage is an orange headline, The Way to Build a Better Web Site, over a plan called GeoCities Pro: a domain, 25MB disk space, five email accounts and ad-free pages for $8.95/mo plus a $15 setup fee. Under it sit GeoCities Plus at $4.95 a month and GeoCities Webmaster at $11.95.

The free page hasn't disappeared. It has moved into the left column, in smaller type: Sign up for a free web site and join the largest home page community on the Web. The next sentence is the sales pitch: As your web site grows, you can easily upgrade to any of our premium packages.

Many members built those pages with Yahoo's own PageBuilder tool. Media artist Olia Lialina, who studied the rescued pages, found Yahoo-made backgrounds and templates among them, some last modified on July 9, 2002^[10]. Part of the look people remember from GeoCities came from Yahoo's designers.

By June 2005 the GeoCities homepage is a price list. GeoCities FREE Web Hosting costs $0/mo. and promises to Share your personality with the world, for free. Then Plus, No ads plus extra storage, at $4.95, Pro, Your own domain plus email, at $8.95, and Web Hosting Starter at $11.95. A photo of an older man with a small child carries the caption Share your family.

By our June 2006 capture the logo has changed to gray capitals, GEOCITIES, and a purple box offers Free blog before Free web site. The Pro plan promises a free domain (e.g. www.yahoo.com), with Yahoo's own address as the example. The 2007 page keeps the same layout and plans, and its small print moves the discount deadline from 6/30/2006 to 3/31/2007.

The 2008 GeoCities homepage turns the plans into a comparison table. Plus gets 500MB of disk space, Pro 2,000MB and Yahoo Web Hosting Unlimited, while the setup fee row reads $10, $15 and No setup fee (save $25). Email addresses: 0, 5 and 1,000.

On June 19, 2009 the GeoCities homepage opens with an apology: Sorry, new GeoCities accounts are no longer available. The note for current customers reads After careful consideration, we have decided to close GeoCities later this year. We'll share more details this summer.

The rest of the page sells somewhere else to live. Yahoo Web Hosting costs $5.98 a month for the first three months and promises answers even at 2 a.m. with 24-hour phone support. A box on the right suggests a free Yahoo profile to Connect with the people who matter to you most.

GeoCities.com was discontinued on October 26, 2009^[8]. On August 25 the Internet Archive had asked members to submit their pages to its special collection^[9].

Separately, a volunteer group, the Archive Team, began sharing a torrent of rescued pages on the first anniversary of the closure, October 26, 2010^[10]. Lialina and Dragan Espenschied bought a 2-TB disk on November 1 to download it^[10]. Yahoo Japan's GeoCities was a separate service and lasted until March 31, 2019^[11].