GeoCities: The Neighborhood Where Everyone Built a Homepage
Free homepages, "under construction" GIFs and street addresses for websites. GeoCities was the web's first big neighborhood.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
In the mid-1990s, if you wanted your own website, you needed a server, some technical knowledge and usually some money. GeoCities offered something simpler: a free homepage and a place to put it.
Beverly Hills Internet
David Bohnett and John Rezner started the company in November 1994 in southern California as Beverly Hills Internet. It began with a web directory organized into six themed "neighborhoods," most of them named after Los Angeles places: Colosseum, Hollywood, RodeoDrive, SunsetStrip, WallStreet and WestHollywood. In mid-1995 it started giving users 2 MB of space to build a free home page inside one of those neighborhoods. The users were called homesteaders.
Your neighborhood became part of your address, followed by a street number, like geocities.com/RodeoDrive/ plus four digits. Computer pages were supposed to go in SiliconValley, entertainment pages in Hollywood. Nobody really enforced it, so a Hollywood address could belong to a college student's page about anything at all. In December 1995 the company renamed itself GeoCities.
A million homesteaders
Chat rooms and message boards turned the neighborhoods into communities, and the site grew fast. By December 1995 it was signing up thousands of new homesteaders a day. GeoCities registered its millionth homesteader on October 2, 1997. That year it also started putting ads on members' pages, and in 1998 it added a floating watermark logo to the corner of every page, which many users hated.
GeoCities went public in August 1998 at $17 a share, and the stock passed $100. By 1999 it was the third-most-visited site on the web, behind only AOL and Yahoo.
Yahoo moves in
In January 1999, near the top of the dot-com bubble, Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.57 billion in stock. It got off to a bad start. Yahoo's new terms of service said the company owned the content users posted, and users started leaving in protest until Yahoo backed down. That July, the neighborhood addresses were replaced with simpler addresses based on member names.
GeoCities never made much money. It reported an $8 million loss for the last quarter of 1998, and in 2001 Yahoo added paid hosting and limited how much traffic free accounts could get.
Closing time
On April 23, 2009, Yahoo announced it was shutting GeoCities down in the United States, and the service closed on October 26, 2009. At least 38 million pages had been published there. A ZDNet editor called it the first proof that something could be hugely popular online and still not make money.
The internet's preservationists got to work. The Internet Archive set out to save as much of GeoCities as it could. A volunteer group, Archive Team, grabbed what it could before the deadline and on October 29, 2010, a year after the shutdown, released about 900 GB of GeoCities pages as one giant download. Thanks to them, a large part of the early web's homemade side still exists.