I want you to close your eyes for a second. I'm
driving, of course, please don't close your eyes.
But mentally, I want you to transport yourself
back. Okay. We're going to November 1994. The
world is just, it's a drastically different place.
Oh, completely. You know, Friends has just premiered
on TV. The Sony PlayStation, it just launched
in Japan. Yep. And the internet. The internet
is this quiet, text -heavy, mostly gray place.
I mean, there's no Google to organize it. There's
no Facebook to connect everybody. Not at all.
Amazon is, what, a rumor about some guy selling
books out of his garage? Exactly. It's barely
a thing. It really was the Wild West. Or maybe
a better way to put it is it was like a library
where all the books were just thrown on the floor
in one giant pile. It was raw. It was silent.
And it was largely academic. That's a perfect
analogy for it. In Southern California, specifically
in the 90210 zip code, you have two guys, David
Bonnet and John Reznor, and they're sitting in
an office at 9401 Wilshire Boulevard. And they
are about to launch something that for a very
brief, you know, shining moment becomes the absolute
center of the online universe. And they call
it Beverly Hills Internet. Beverly Hills Internet.
Which, of course, later becomes the behemoth
that we all know as GeoCities. And frankly, this
is the moment. This is the point where the Internet
stops being just a utility for scientists and
the military. Right. And it becomes a place where
human beings. actually lived. Lived is the perfect
word there. We're doing a deep dive today into
the rise and, well, the eventual fall of geocities.
And look, if you were online in the late 90s,
just hearing that name, it probably triggers
a very specific sensory memory. Oh, absolutely.
The under construction gifts with the little
digging man. The blinking text. Yeah. The MIDI
music that you couldn't turn off no matter what
you did. Chaotic aesthetic is what we remember,
for sure. But the story underneath all of that
is, I mean, it's fascinatingly complex. We are
talking about the invention of the online community.
We really are. We are talking about a business
that was acquired for $3 .57 billion. That's
with a B, despite having, what, almost zero revenue?
I still can't get past that number. $3 .5 billion.
It's staggering. For a site that was famous for
being free and, let's be honest, arguably pretty
ugly. Agrees. And we're also talking about a
tragic ending. It involves privacy scandals,
corporate mismanagement, and this frantic race
by digital archaeologists to save history before
it was deleted forever. That three and a half
billion, though. It's the headline number, always.
But to understand that valuation and to understand
the tragedy of its collapse, you have to understand
what GeoCities actually was. Because it wasn't
just web hosting. No. It was a psychological
experiment in digital geography. So let's unpack
this. right at the beginning. Late 1994, Bunnett
and Reznor start Beverly Hills Internet, or BHI.
It's such a 90s name for a tech company, isn't
it? It's incredibly 90s. It sounds like a cable
provider for rich people or something. But their
location, Wilshire Boulevard, that's interesting
because they were physically in this high -rent
district. Right. But they were building what
was effectively a digital slum. I mean, a free
space. for absolutely everyone well you know
initially the concept was just web hosting But
they ran into the fundamental problem of the
early web, which was discoverability. How do
you find anything? Exactly. In 1994, there were
no search algorithms. You couldn't just type
cat photos or Star Trek fan fiction into a search
bar and get a million results ranked by relevance.
It didn't exist. If you put a page up, it was
like throwing a message in a bottle into the
ocean. No one would find it unless you gave them
the exact specific coordinates. So they needed
a map. Right. They needed a taxonomy, a way to
organize information that humans could intuitively
understand without needing a computer science
degree. So they looked at the real world. And
what did they see? They said, how do we organize
people offline? And the answer is we organize
them into cities and neighborhoods based on shared
interests or demographics. And this is the hook.
This is the thing that I think. defines Web 1
.0, the neighborhood metaphor. It changed everything.
They decided that users wouldn't just be users.
No, they would be homesteaders. I love that term.
And you didn't just upload a file. You moved
into a neighborhood. You were staking a claim.
It makes the abstract internet feel favical.
So walk us through the map. If I'm a tech nerd
in 1995, where do I live? You move to Silicon
Valley. That was the neighborhood for computer
hardware, programming, tech talk, all that stuff.
Okay, that makes sense. Yeah. And what if I'm
obsessed with movies? Or say I want to make a
fan page for the X -Files. Then you go to Hollywood.
That was the spot for entertainment. Simple enough.
What about the other original ones? The source
material says there were six distinct neighborhoods
right at the start. You had Wall Street, which
was for finance, investing, business talk. Right.
Coliseum for sports. Sunset Strip for music and
nightlife. Okay. And then you had Rodeo Drive.
Which I'm guessing, keeping with that Beverly
Hills theme, had to be for shopping. Shopping,
fashion, and, you know, general lifestyle stuff.
Yeah. But here's the genius part. It wasn't just
a category tag. It wasn't like a hashtag. It
was a literal address. Right. When you signed
up, you didn't get geocities .com, Steve. You
got geocities .com, Ford for sale, Imelken Valley,
7201. You had a house number. On a street. You
had a house number. And because they were sequential,
the low numbers became status symbols. I bet
they did. If you were at Hollywood 1005. You
were an early settler. You were one of the founding
fathers of that digital block. And if you were
at Hollywood 9000. You were living way out in
the suburbs. You were a newcomer. That is just
fascinating. It immediately creates a social
hierarchy and a sense of scarcity in a medium
of digital space that is theoretically infinite.
Exactly right. It tapped into our, you know,
our primate desire for status and location. And
it solved the navigation problem. Well, if I
wanted to find other people who liked what I
liked, I didn't need a search engine. I just
walked around. around the Hollywood neighborhood,
I could literally click a next button and see
who lived next door to me. It's serendipitous
discovery. You're just stumbling upon things
you're exploring. And that fueled massive growth.
In July of 1995, they expanded. They added Capitol
Hill for politics. Of course. Paris for romance
and poetry. Tokyo for anime and Asian culture.
And by December 1995, BHI officially rebranded
as GeoCities. And the numbers by this point were
just exploding. Oh, yeah. Thousands. Thousands
of homesteaders were registering every single
day. By the end of 95, they were getting 6 million
monthly page views. Which we have to stop and
remind everyone, in 1995, that is an astronomical
number. The web was tiny. 6 million views is
like having Super Bowl numbers today relative
to the size of the audience. And you have to
remember the constraints they were working with.
In mid -1995, GeoCities offered you 2 megabytes
of storage space. 2 megabytes. I want to pause
on that because I think for a mom... Modern listener,
that number might not even register. It's so
small. It's nothing. My phone takes a photo of
my lunch and it's 5 megabytes. Right. But in
1995, you were on a dial -up modem. A 56K modem,
if you were lucky. Maybe even a 14 .4K. That
horrible screeching sound. Exactly. downloading
a high -res photo would take 10 minutes. So the
web was built on text and tiny, tiny graphics.
Two megabytes was actually a sprawling estate
if you were just writing HTML and using low -res
clip art. It was enough room to build a mansion,
text -wise. Absolutely. So people built their
mansions. They added guest books for people to
sign. They added those little hit counters at
the bottom. Oh, the hit counters? You are the
45th person to visit my site. Yeah. It was all
about validating your existence online. I am
here. I built this. People saw it. It really
was the precursor to social media, wasn't it?
But with a crucial difference. It wasn't a feed.
You weren't just shouting into a stream. You
were tending a garden. You were building a home
that people had to actually come and visit. That's
a beautiful way to put it. It was pull media,
not push media. But, you know, as with all utopian
projects on the web, reality eventually comes
knocking. And reality usually looks like a venture
capitalist asking, so how do we make money from
this? Pretty much. Which brings us to the growing
pains. We're in 1996, 1997 now. The company has
moved its headquarters to Santa Monica. They're
growing up. But they are burning cash. Web hosting
is expensive. It's very expensive, even if it's
just 2 MB per user. When you have millions of
users and millions of hits, bandwidth costs money.
Servers cost money. So in May 1997... They did
the inevitable. They introduced ads. And I'm
sure the homesteaders took this with grace and
understanding. A brief laugh. Absolutely not.
No. Yeah. They viewed it as a complete invasion
of their space. But the ads were just the start.
The real war. And I mean, to the users, it felt
like a war started in June 1998. The watermark
controversy. The watermark controversy. I read
about this and it sounds incredibly intrusive.
Can you explain what the watermark actually was
from a technical perspective? So GeoCities wanted
to brand the content. They wanted everyone to
know this. is a GeoCities site. So they developed
a transparent GIF logo, but they didn't just
put it at the top of the page. No, no. They used
JavaScript overlay. Oh, no. And this overlay
made the logo float in the bottom right corner
of the browser window. Like a network bug on
a TV show. The little CNN logo or something.
Exactly like that. But here's the technical problem.
This is 1998. Browsers like Netscape Navigator
and Internet Explorer 4 were, let's say, temperamental
a polite word for it and web design was done
using html tables you know you'd nest a table
inside a table inside another table just to get
the layout right it was house of cards a very
fragile house of cards and then geocities injects
this dynamic javascript element that's constantly
trying to calculate the screen position it was
heavy it slowed down the scrolling it broke things
and Often, it would completely break the rendering
of the underlying page. It would cover up navigation
buttons. It would make text unreadable. So it's
not just that they put a logo on your work. They
essentially graffitied your house, and in the
process, they broke the front door lock. That
is exactly how the users felt. It was a violation
of their sovereign space. They had spent hours,
days, hand -coding these pages, and the landlord
just came in and slapped a neon sign on the window.
The revolt must have been massive. It was. People
threatened to leave in droves. They organized
boycotts. It was a huge mess. And how did corporate
respond to this? Did they say, sorry, we messed
up, we'll take it down? This is the part that
just makes you cynical about corporate PR. GeoCities
issued a press release. And in it, they claim
that the feedback regarding the watermark had
been overwhelmingly positive. Get out of here.
Overwhelmingly positive. That is straight up
gaslighting your entire user base. It just highlights
this massive disconnect. The executives in Santa
Monica were looking at spreadsheets with brand
impressions. The users in Silicon Valley were
looking at broken code and a ruined homepage.
Unbelievable. But paradoxically, the growth didn't
actually stop, did it? The momentum was just
too strong. It was. On October 2, 1997, they
hit one million registered users. One million
homesteaders. In 1997 numbers, that's basically
a nation state. It really is. And Wall Street,
well, they smelled blood in the water. In August
1998, GeoCities goes public. The ticker symbol
is G -C -T -Y. They price the IPO at $17 a share.
And this is the absolute peak of the dot -com
mania. Oh, it went vertical. I mean, the price
just skyrocketed. It went to over $100 per share
almost immediately. By 1999, GeoCities was the
third most visited site on the entire web. The
third. Who was beating them? Only AOL and Yahoo.
That's it. Wow. They were bigger than Amazon
at that point. They were bigger than Microsoft's
MSN. They were absolute titans. So you have this
company with millions of users, a stock price
that is completely defying gravity, and a user
base that is somehow simultaneously. addicted
to the service and furious at the management.
It's a powder keg. It is. And then the match
gets lit. Which brings us to segment three, the
acquisition. January 1999. The absolute zenith
of the dot -com bubble, Yahoo. What you have
to remember was the Google of its day. It was
the kingmaker. They were everything. They were
everything. And they decided they need to own
this community. They announced they are buying
GeoCities for $3 .7 billion in stock. I really
need to stop and just dwell on this number. $3
.57 billion. And you mentioned earlier they weren't
profitable. Not profitable is putting it mildly.
In the fourth quarter of 1998, right before the
sale, GeoCities posted an $8 million loss. So
Yahoo. paid nearly $4 billion for a company that
was actively losing money. They weren't buying
revenue, they were buying eyeballs. That was
the metric of the 90s. The whole theory was,
get the traffic now, figure out how to monetize
it later. Yahoo thought, if we own the community,
we own the web. But there's a huge difference
between buying a billboard and buying a community.
And it seems like Yahoo just did not understand
that distinction. They fundamentally misunderstood
the culture. And the friction started literally
the moment the deal closed. When the acquisition
was finalized in May 1999, Yahoo updated the
terms of service. The dreaded TOS update. Never
good news. But this wasn't just some minor legalese
change. The new term stated that Yahoo owned
all rights and content to anything posted on
GeoCities. Wait, what? Your text, your artwork,
your personal photos, everything. So you're telling
me if I'm a mom in 1999 and I post a photo of
my newborn baby on my Heartland GeoCities page
to show my grandmother, Yahoo now owns that photo?
According to the text of the agreement they put
out, yes. They claim the right to reproduce it,
to modify it, to distribute it however they want
it. That's dystopian. It was a complete disaster.
The users who were already, you know, on edge
from the watermark incident, they went nuclear.
I can't even imagine. The homesteaders saw themselves
as property owners. And now the new landlord
was coming in and claiming he owned all the furniture
inside the house, too. Wow. Yahoo was forced
to reverse the decision very, very quickly because
of the backlash. But the trust, the trust was
just vaporized, gone. And then in July 1999,
they made the change that I think really drove
the final nail into the coffin of the culture.
The big one. They killed the neighborhoods. This
was the real tragedy. Yahoo looked at the Silicon
Valley 1334 address system and thought, this
is too complicated. It's hard to remember. Right.
So they switched to vanity URLs, geocities .com
member name. Now on paper, that sounds better.
It's personalized. Why was that a bad thing?
Because it destroyed the taxonomy. It destroyed
the sense of place. When you were in Hollywood,
you were part of a tribe. You had neighbors.
You had an identity. You had an identity. When
you became just geocities .com forward slash
Jason, you were an island. You were just floating
in a void. It shifted the entire model from community
centric to user centric. It turned a city into
a storage locker. Precisely. And without the
neighborhood structure, discoverability just
tanked. You couldn't just browse the neighborhood
anymore because the neighborhood affected. didn't
exist. You had to rely on Yahoo's directory or
its search function, which just wasn't the same
experience. And then, as the bubble was bursting
in 2000 and 2001, Yahoo. Started tightening the
screws on the technical side, too. Right. The
party was over. Tech stocks were crashing. Yahoo
needed to make GeoCities profitable now. So they
introduced premium hosting and they started to
throttle the free accounts. Explain the throttling.
I've heard horror stories about this from back
of the day. OK, so they set a data transfer limit.
Officially, it was something like three gigabytes
a month, which sounds OK. Yeah, that doesn't
sound too bad. But the way they enforced it was
draconian. It was actually calculated on an hourly
basis, something like. 4 .2 megabytes per hour
wait 4 .2 megabytes per hour yes so if i have
a popular fan page with say five photos on it
and just 10 people visit it in five minutes boom
your site goes dark the next visitor gets a service
temporarily unavailable message and your site
stays down for the rest of that hour That is
literally punishing success. It's the worst possible
model for a web host. Congratulations on becoming
popular. We will now shut you off. Wow. It made
it impossible to run a viral site or a popular
community on GeoCities. It drove the best creators,
the people who are actually bringing in the traffic
away to other hosts or to paid services. Oh,
what's left? It left behind only the abandoned
pages and the very small personal sites that
got almost no traffic. It essentially created
a ghost town. A ghost town. While the site was
slowly dying on the outside, there was something
else happening in the background, something legal.
And this brings us to segment four, the dark
side. Because while GeoCities was painting itself
as this friendly, quirky community, they were
doing something with user data that got them
in serious trouble. Yes. This is a critical chapter
that often gets glossed over in all the nostalgia.
In 1999, the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC,
filed a complaint against GeoCities. And this
was a landmark case. It was arguably the first
major internet privacy case. And what was the
specific charge? Deceptive acts and practices.
Deceptive how? It comes down to the promise versus
the reality. When you signed up for GeoCities,
the new member application asked for a lot of
personal info. Your income, your education level,
marital status, occupation. A lot of data. A
lot. But they had a privacy policy that explicitly
stated, and I'm paraphrasing, we will not share
this information with anyone without your permission.
A very clear promise. Your secrets are safe with
us. Crystal clear. And then they sold it. They
sold the data. To who? To third party advertisers.
They created this whole database called the GeoCities
Marketing Network. They sold lists. Here are
all the women in the Hollywood neighborhood who
make over $50 ,000 a year. They allowed advertisers
to target. banner ads based on all that private
data you provided so the users were the product
even back then explicitly and it gets darker
geocities was as you can imagine very popular
with children it was a playground for kids learning
html for the first time i was one of them I made
my first terrible website on GeoCities when I
was about 12 years old. Exactly. And the FTC
found that GeoCities was knowingly collecting
personal information from children, names, email
addresses, their interests, even when they knew
they didn't have parental permission. This sounds
exactly like the privacy battles we're fighting
today with TikTok and Meta and everyone else.
It is the same battle. GeoCities was the canary
in the coal mine. The FTC settlement required
them to post a clear privacy notice and get parental
consent for kids' data, but the damage was done.
It proved that the business model of Web 1 .0
wasn't just about hosting. It was about data
extraction. It's pretty sobering to realize that
the so -called innocent days of the web weren't
actually that innocent at all. No. The surveillance
capitalism model was there from the start. It
just wasn't as sophisticated as it is now. So,
okay, let's recap. We have the loss of community
identity when they killed the neighborhoods.
Yeah. We have the loss of utility because of
the throttling. And we have the loss of trust
from the privacy scandal. The decline from here
feels, well, it feels inevitable. It was. Which
brings us to the end, segment five. The end of
an era. It was a long, slow decline. For 10 years,
from 1999 all the way to 2009 Yahoo, just let
GeoCities rot. They didn't innovate. They didn't
fix the bugs. It became a punchline. It really
did. Oh, you still have a GeoCities page, became
an insult. It was like living in a condemned
building. with flickering lights and peeling
paint. And then, in April 2009, the landlord
finally served the eviction notice. Yahoo announced
that GeoCities US would be closing. They stopped
all new registrations, and they set the date
of death, October 26, 2009. I remember when this
happened. And even though I hadn't visited my
old site in probably a decade, I felt this real
pang of grief, almost. It was a brush with digital
mortality. We were used to things on the internet
being permanent, or at least feeling permanent.
But suddenly, Yahoo said, we are going to delete
38 million pages. 38 million. Just think about
that scale. 38 million personal expressions,
diaries, fan fiction, conspiracy theories, tributes
to dead pets, family photo albums, all of it
slated for the digital incinerator. Why did they
do it? I mean, was it costing them that much
to keep the servers running in 2009? Probably
not that much, honestly. Storage had gotten very
cheap by then, but it wasn't making any money.
Rupert Goodwin's at ZDNet said something really
brutal but true at the time. What was that? He
said GeoCities was the first proof that you could
have something really popular and still not make
any money on the Internet. Oof. That is the hard
truth of the entire dot -com era in one sentence.
Popularity does not equal profitability. And
Vijay Mookie, a security expert, called it a
lost opportunity. He pointed out that if Yahoo
had just understood what they had, the social
connections, the community, they could have built
Facebook. They had the users. They had the social
graph. They just didn't build the tools to connect
them. They treated it like a file system instead
of a society. It's one of the biggest what -ifs
in the history of tech. But there's a weird little
twist in this story, a survival story of sorts.
A Japanese exception. Yes. Tell us about this
parallel universe. So while Yahoo was shutting
down GeoCities in the U .S. and Europe and everywhere
else in 2009, GeoCities Japan just kept going.
Why? Well, Yahoo. Japan is a separate corporate
entity and in Japan the service was actually
still quite popular. The culture of anonymity
and personal avatars is very strong in the Japanese
web and GeoCities fit that model. Much better
than Facebook did, at least initially. So they
just kept it running? They kept it running. For
how long? For another 10 years. GeoCities Japan
didn't actually close until March 31st, 2019.
2019. That is wild. So while the rest of us were
migrating to Instagram and Snapchat and TikTok,
there were people in Japan still hand -coding
HTML pages on GeoCities. It just shows that the
death of a platform is often a business decision,
not a user decision. If the company wants to
keep it running, the users will often stay. But
in the US, the plug was pulled in 2009. And this
is where the story shifts from a tragedy to more
of a thriller. Segment 6. Digital archaeology.
Because those 38 million pages didn't just vanish
without a fight. This is my favorite part of
the story. It's like the saving private Ryan
of the Internet. When Yahoo announced the closure,
they only gave a few months notice. Right. They
didn't offer a tool to exprate your site easily.
They just said, save your files or they're gone
forever. And a lot of people had lost their passwords
or maybe the creator had passed away in the intervening
decade. Exactly. The data was orphaned. So a
group of archivists mobilized the Internet Archive,
the people who run the way back. machine, they
stepped up. But the real heavy lifting, the heroic
effort, was done by this rogue group called Archive
Team. Archive Team? That sounds like a special
ops unit. They kind of act like one. It's led
by Jason Scott, who is a renowned historian of
the web. They viewed Yahoo's action as an act
of cultural vandalism. They basically said, if
you won't save this history, we will steal it.
So how did they do it? Did Yahoo cooperate and
give them the data? No, of course not. Yahoo
was actively throttling them, just like they
throttled their users. The archive team had to
write custom scripts, basically hacking tools,
to scour the neighborhoods. They brute forced
the URLs. They just started downloading every
image, every MIDI file, every HTML page they
could find. So it was like a distributed denial
of service attack, but for preservation. Exactly.
A DDoS for good. They were in a race against
the clock. And on October 26, when the servers
finally went dark, they had managed to grab...
of a massive chunk of it. How much did they get?
On the first anniversary of the shutdown, in
October 2010, they released a torrent file. Okay.
How big? Roughly 900 gigabytes. 900 gigabytes
of 1990s web content. That is, that's incredibly
dense. It's immense. It's millions and millions
of sites. Now, it's not perfect. It's a broken
mirror, as they call it. Some images are missing.
Some links go nowhere. But it preserved the essence
of it. And there were other projects, too, like
Reocities, which tried to rebuild the neighborhood
structure. Why does this matter, though? I mean,
why save a bunch of ugly websites from 1998 with
blinking text? Because it's folk art. It's history.
If you went to a cave and saw stick figures drawn
on the wall from 5 ,000 years ago, you wouldn't
say, well, the anatomy is bad, let's scrub it
off. Of course not. You would say, this is how
they saw the world. GeoCities is the cave painting
of the digital age. It captures a moment of innocence,
of pure experimentation, of just, I was here.
That is profound. It's the raw, unfiltered voice
of the people before the algorithms took over
and told us what to like. Exactly. So let's wrap
this up. We've gone from the launch into Beverly
Hills office to the billions, to the bust, and
finally to the rescue mission. What is the big
takeaway here? What is the so what of the GeoCities
story? I think the so what is about the shift
from creation to consumption. GeoCities demanded
that you create. You had to learn at least a
little bit of HTML. You had to make layout decisions.
You had to physically build your digital home
brick by brick. It was an active process. It
was active. Today, for the most part, we are
passive. We pour our content into pre -made molds.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, they control the
layout. They control the font. You just provide
the data. We went from being homesteaders, building
our own cabins, to being renters in a giant corporate
high rise. And the landlord can kick us out any
time. And the landlord is spying on us through
the windows. That is a terrifying but, yeah,
very accurate analogy. The failure of GeoCities
paved the way for the modern web because it taught
companies that hosting wasn't the business. The
business was the data. The business was the ad
network. Yahoo just figured it out too late and
executed it far too poorly. I want to leave you,
our listener, with a final thought to mull over.
We talked about how Yahoo deleted 38 million
pages with just a few months notice. And we tend
to assume our current digital lives are permanent.
We think our Instagram photos, our Google Drive
backups, our Spotify playlists, we think they're
written in stone. We trust the cloud. We trust
the cloud. But if a giant like Yahoo can simply
hit delete. on a massive chunk of human history
just because it wasn't making its quarterly numbers?
How safe is your digital legacy right now? If
Google or Meta decided tomorrow that your neighborhood
wasn't profitable, where would you go? And what
would you be able to take with you? That is the
question that keeps archivists awake at night.
And it should probably keep you awake too. Make
a backup, folks. Thanks for diving deep with
us into the digital ruins of geocities. Always
a pleasure. We'll see you on the next Deep Dive.