Yahoo: Contrary to Rumor, GeoCities Not Closing Down
Widely-forwarded mail is a hoax, Yahoo says
May 7, 2001
A FORWARDED EMAIL claiming that Yahoo will soon eliminate GeoCities, its extremely popular platform for building personal Web pages, is a hoax, according to a Yahoo corporate spokesperson.
"It's absolutely not true," Mary Osako, Senior PR Manager for Yahoo Inc., told reporters on Monday. "GeoCities is and will continue to be a thriving online community."
Indeed, there are no signs of an impending change on the GeoCities home page, where users are invited, as always, to sign up and create their own sites free of charge. "We are still actively seeking new members," Osako said.She ventured no theories as to where the false rumor might have come from. "New Internet rumors get started every day. This is just the latest one."
A similar rumor turned up in Usenet discussions in March but apparently wasn't timely enough to capture the public's fancy. This newer version, first sighted on April 27, 2001 has shot from modem to modem faster than a speeding bullet:
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Subj: Geocities Users: an Alert!!!!! Hey all, As you all know, my hubby is a Community Leader for Geocities. He just got this in his email today. Geocities WILL BE CLOSING! All the websites will be DELETED and CLOSED! They will be NO WARNING as usual, that's just the way Yahoo works. So, if any of you want to keep your website, you will have to back it up and save it, and move it to a new web hosting place. This is not a internet hoax, my husband got this from his boss, it could happen in a week, it could happen in about a month. My hubby said to tell as many people as I can, so that you will not lose your site, and so you can be ready to move it to another place. :o( Linda Below is part of the memo he received: "Yahoo executives declined to specify which areas of its service will be affected by the cutbacks. In general, however, the company said the only areas spared would be those that directly produced revenue advertising, services to businesses and its new fee-based services for consumers." "Big areas of its site like the Geocities service, which lets users build personal home pages are NOT part of this new, narrower focus, even though they contain some advertising. They will be closed." |
Note that the quoted material described as a "memo" above doesn't read like a memo at all, but rather like an excerpt from a news story - a news story that never existed. Plenty of recent articles have referred to Yahoo's financial woes and its intention to move in the direction of fee-based services to generate more revenue, but none have forecast the closure of existing parts of the service to cut costs. (UPDATE: It has been discovered that part of the quoted text — excluding the final sentence, "They will be closed" — came from a New York Times article dated April 12, 2001. The addition of the final, ersatz sentence by the unknown author of this email rumor made the passage appear to say the opposite of what it actually said.)
In short, Yahoo's future plans revolve around taking better advantage of existing traffic, not eliminating it. Anything you hear to the contrary is folklore.
2009 UPDATE: Yahoo announced in April 2009 that it will close GeoCities for good by the end of the year. Read more...
Sources and further reading:
- Yahoo Has Learned Its Lesson: Free Is a Dirty Word
The Street.com, 30 April 2001. - Yahoo Reports Quarterly Loss And Schedules Round of Cuts
New York Times, 12 April 2001. - Yahoo Taps Hollywood's Semel as Its New Chairman and CEO
Wall Street Journal, 18 April 2001.
