GeoCities
You might remember it as Beverly Hills Internet
The archive has not found a surviving copy.
1996·Early web, before YouTube·informative
Thirty-eight million homemade pages, arranged into neighbourhoods, and then switched off.
At a glanceThe facts
- Remembered as
- Beverly Hills Internet
- Spread in
- 1996
- Began as
- A web page
- Where it started
- geocities
- Format
- Phenomenon
- Made by
- David Bohnett and John Rezner
- Original title
- Beverly Hills Internet
- Record
- The third most-visited website in 1999, behind AOL and Yahoo!
- Origin
- Not an upload originally
- Available
- Not held by ViralWorld
What this wasThe story
GeoCities gave anybody a free website. You picked a neighbourhood by subject — SiliconValley for computers, Hollywood for entertainment, Area51 for science fiction — and got an address inside it. What people built there was tiled backgrounds, animated flames, MIDI files that started on load, hit counters, guestbooks, and an under-construction sign that was frequently never removed.
Yahoo bought it in 1999 when it was the third most-visited site on the web, and closed the American service on 26 October 2009. At least thirty-eight million pages went with it. Volunteer archivists rescued what they could in the weeks before shutdown, which is the largest single act of amateur web preservation there has been, and the reason any of it survives at all.
Why it matteredWhat changed
A free home for personal web pages, it was the third most-visited site on the web by 1999. When it closed, volunteers copied what they could and published it.
TimelineIn order
- Made
David Bohnett and John Rezner launch the service as Beverly Hills Internet.1
- Later
It is renamed GeoCities. Pages are grouped into “neighbourhoods” named after real places.1
- Corrected
Yahoo!’s new terms of service claim ownership of everything users have posted. Users leave in large numbers and the terms are reversed.1
- Mainstream
Yahoo! announces it will buy GeoCities for 3.57 billion US dollars in stock.1
- Taken down
GeoCities closes in the United States. At least 38 million pages go with it.1
- Later
The volunteer group Archive Team releases a copy of what it saved, about 900 gigabytes.1
- Taken down
The Japanese service, which had kept running, is closed.1 What else happened on 31 March
What people misrememberSet straight
Commonly remembered asGeoCities shut down in 2009.
ActuallyThe United States service did. GeoCities Japan stayed open until March 2019.1
Why it is here: something the internet still knows by name · a moment that changed what the internet did next · it got out of its own corner of the internet fast · still being watched and quoted years later
This began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on GeoCities.
Where it came fromWhat we know
There is no original upload to identify: this did not begin as one. There is no copy of it here either — what it was, when it appeared and what people called it is what this page can tell you.
Nothing here is claimed to be the first publication of this Moment, because the first publication was not an upload. This began as a web page, not as a video. Originally published on GeoCities.
Not established. This index only names a creator where the evidence supports it.
ConnectedFollow it further
- It helped spread Hampster Dance1997
The page was built and hosted on GeoCities, the free service where personal web pages of the time lived.
SourcesWhat was read
Sources last read on . That date is about the history on this page. Whether the media still plays is checked separately and can change any day. How ViralWorld documents things