Yahoo's closing of Geocities is a bad idea
Published by Avi Green on Saturday, April 25, 2009 at 10:31 AM.
A decade after they bought them, Yahoo has now decided to close Geocities:
The ad frame that appears at the side of many pages may have also turned people off. They used to have one that was in drop-down format, and should've kept it that way, but no, they couldn't be bothered to do that either. Maybe this'll be a lesson to other companies that offer free webhosting options, that, if you must put ads on the site, at least try to avoid being too obtrusive about it. That way, people can sign up and use their options without too many complaints. And keep the bandwidth at a reasonable amount!
SUNNYVALE, Calif. (AP) - Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it plans to close GeoCities, a Web site publishing and hosting service it bought in May 1999 at the height of the dot-com boom for around $3 billion in stock.I don't think this is a good idea, partly because now, some people who built a space on Geocities for whatever purpose will now be forced to move elsewhere. But I can tell why this came around: they gave very low bandwidth for loading the sites, which often caused many that I tried to access to go offline and become unavailable for at least a few hours at a time. Free Web Hosting, a directory of services, no longer has them listed, but when they did, there were reader comments that complained about this. Yet Yahoo did nothing to make people feel better about using their sitebuilding services. And they wonder why they must've lost so many users?
The service will be shut down later this year. Visitors to the site now see a message that says new GeoCities accounts will not be available and gives them the option to sign up for Yahoo's Web hosting service for $5.98 a month.
It is not clear when Yahoo made the move, but a spokesman said in an e-mailed statement that the decision was recent.
GeoCities is not the only Yahoo service to get the ax - Yahoo Briefcase, Farechase, My Web, RSS ads, Yahoo Pets, Yahoo Live, Kickstart and Yahoo For Teachers all are being eliminated as well. The search giant also recently outsourced Launchcast radio to CBS Corp.
"As part of Yahoo's ongoing effort to build products and services that deliver the best possible experiences for consumers and results for advertisers, we are increasing investment in some areas while scaling back in others," the statement said.
The trimming is part of a process that started in 2007 while Jerry Yang was still chief executive, to close down services that aren't profitable or don't fit into company's long-term vision.
The revamp has accelerated under new CEO Carol Bartz, who was hired in January.
In a sign of its ongoing troubles, Yahoo said Tuesday that it will lay off nearly 700 workers, the company's third round of job cuts during the past 14 months.
Yahoo earned $118 million, or 8 cents per share, during the first three months of the year. That represents a 78 percent drop from net income of $537 million, or 37 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
Revenue fell 13 percent to $1.58 billion.
Yahoo shares rose 7 cents Thursday to close at $14.55.
The ad frame that appears at the side of many pages may have also turned people off. They used to have one that was in drop-down format, and should've kept it that way, but no, they couldn't be bothered to do that either. Maybe this'll be a lesson to other companies that offer free webhosting options, that, if you must put ads on the site, at least try to avoid being too obtrusive about it. That way, people can sign up and use their options without too many complaints. And keep the bandwidth at a reasonable amount!
