Yahoo have killed off GeoCities

Yahoo have finally decided that it is time to shut down GeoCities. The free services used to host personal home pages, and it was bought for more than $4bn 10 years ago. The service is no longer accepting members, and it will close later this year.

The move will drop around 700 workers and this is all to cut costs and focus on fundamentals. The company is planning to grow to compete against Google, and to grow they need to cut this.

The service had over 3.5 million websites hosted on it since the late 1990’s. Recently the service fell out of favour as social networking sites such as FaceBook and MySpace became popular.

“We have decided to discontinue the process of allowing new customers to sign up for GeoCities accounts as we focus on helping our customers explore and build new relationships online in other ways,” Yahoo said in a statement.

“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.”