MARY STU'S TAVERN SAYS FAREWELL TO GEOCITIES
HOME TO THE TAVERN FROM 1998 UNTIL 2009
"Goodbye, old friend!"
The most recent GeoCities logo
This site has had a history of eleven years with Geocities, a
provider of free Web space for the personal homepages of ordinary
people who wanted to own a little piece of the Internet for
themselves. Whether for family pictures, vacation memories, something
about the pet, kids' school photos and awards, hobbies, special
interests, and, of course, personal fan pages for that actor,
actress, singer, or special movie someone saw and enjoyed, Geocities
was able to provide space. A plethora of different sites sprang up
from the year Geocities was founded, as "Beverly Hills Internet" in
1995 by Silicon Valley residents David Bohnett and John Rezner. Their
idea was to separate their server space into cyber cities comprising
the different interests of the users. Political sites could find an
address in such neighborhoods as Senate. The user would pick a
numbered residence there, such as 6639, and wind up with the address
www.oocities.org/Politics/Senate/6639. The graphics consisted of a
housing tract with address numbers. The user would click on that
house and register the address with Geocities. With the help of
Geocities' homepage builder, they would have a site up, and in 1995
that meant using dial-up. Because of the limitations of the
technology of the mid and late 1990s, most of the sites had nothing
more novel than animated GIF images, and many users would overload
with them trying to make an "impact."
Around the time Geocities sold out to Yahoo for--get this--$4.7
BILLION, there were flaws showing the business model. The free space
had been increased from 5 megs to 11 megs around 2000, with the small
fee of $4.95 per month getting the user 20 megs. Mary Stu's Tavern
has been a 20 megs site since then, as those sites did not have to
put up with advertising, and we could go crazy archiving the FYI
pages and building additional pages while not worrying too much about
space. Music is something else. A song can gobble 3 megs in one bite
besides usually being protected by copyright laws from unlicensed
broadcasting. The idea behind all of this was to provide free space
with advertising paying for it. The problem was that people would put
up these sites, get bored with them, and not take them down to free
up the space. We've linked to Angel Fire sites like this from the
Bulletin Board section of the Guestbook Page ("Thanks"). People put
up the sites, and leave them to become "grave sites" that just sit
there in cyber space, lonely and unwanted, forgotten by their makers.
Advertising clients were not getting enough response as no one would
visit a lot of the sites either. Ad revenue declined, and this
continued after Yahoo--let's face it--grossly overpaid for Geocities.
The header of the Geocities Control Panel. Pages were
uploaded from here.
While the Tavern was on hiatus from May 2005 until April 2009,
Yahoo/Geocities kept right on going, even through the bursting of the
Dot Com Bubble in the early 2000s, but Yahoo can no longer afford to
go on offering free space and trying to pay for it with advertising
that earns less every year. So, Yahoo is shutting it down, going to a
"pay to play" plan totally under Yahoo management. Yahoo wants the
small business accounts for monthly fees. The Tavern isn't a real
business, but the fees are still not prohibitive, so we'll stay with
Yahoo until the time comes for the Tavern to pass into Internet
history like some of the sites on the Museum page. Geocities was a
great place, no matter what PC WORLD says about the amateurs making
terrible personal Webpages. The Webmasters with Geocities sites had
trouble shooting forums to pose questions to other users and make
suggestions for improving their sites. Suggestions I got there led to
an end to colored backgrounds to white, which looked better, was
easier for reading, and faster loading under the prevailing dial-up
communications.
An early Yahoo! Geocities logo after the highway robbery
sale of Geocities to Yahoo for an inexplicable $4.7 BILLION.
I was happy with Geocities. They took good care of this place
while I was forced to leave the site fallow for those four years
while handling a family crisis. Everything was exactly the way I left
it four years earlier. All that was needed was to update the
necessary pages and get rid of dead links. When I first signed on, a
free newletter was offered. It was called Infobeat. I received
it from 1998 until 2005 when some other "Internet consortium" bought
the title. Infobeat stopped being an independent news letter,
delivered to your e-mail box, and was turned into a mere Web site
with no original reporting. All you get now are links to Fox
News-dot-com. It's kind of a metaphor for what is happening now to
Geocities, which is completely disappearing in a matter of months.
The real meaning of all of this is: the era of the free home page
service is coming to an end, along with the "early days of the
Internet."
I'll miss the old girl. Geocities took good care of Mary Stu's
Tavern, even when I couldn't. We can only hope Yahoo can do the same
for as long as the site remains up on the Web.
Sample of a Statistics page from a Geocities counter
script embedded on each page of a site.
