GeoCities
2009–present logo.
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Type of site
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Web hosting |
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| Owner | Yahoo! |
| Created by | David Bohnett and John Rezner |
| Website | www |
| Alexa rank |
 1,179 (November 2016[update]) |
| Commercial | Yes |
| Registration | Yes |
| Launched | November 1994 |
| Current status | Active in Japan; defunct in the United States, Canada and Europe |
Yahoo! GeoCities (also known as GeoCities) is a web hosting service, currently available only in Japan. It was founded in November 1994 by David Bohnett and John Rezner, and was called Beverly Hills Internet (BHI) for a very short time. On January 28, 1999, GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo!; at that time it was the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web. In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content—for example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood"—hence the name of the site. Shortly after its acquisition by Yahoo!, this practice was abandoned in favor of using the Yahoo! member names in the URLs.
In April 2009, approximately ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009. There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.
In 1996, GeoCities had 29 "neighborhoods," which had groupings of content created by the "homesteaders" (GeoCities users). By 1999, GeoCities had additional neighborhoods and refocused existing neighborhoods.
In 1999, GeoCities had an online commercial presence with GeoCities Marketplace. It included the GeoStore, which sold GeoCities-branded merchandise. Users cashed in GeoPoints in the store.
Prior to the takeover by Yahoo!, GeoCities had a Japanese subsidiary, GeoCities Japan. GeoCities Japan was headquartered in the Nihonbashi Hakozaki Building in the Nihonbashi area of Chūō, Tokyo.
As of February 10, 2016, GeoCities Japan is still online, with no signs of upcoming closure. Its member sites are still accessible, and it is still accepting new account registrations, but now all services are only available in Japanese.
GeoCities Japan has the following neighborhoods:
GeoCities began in mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small Web hosting and development company in Southern California.
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