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Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

money.cnn.com

111–120 of 122 posts

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#112
post #33

i was a part of the team that bought GeoCities at Yahoo, and i think it wasn't as dumb of a deal as it looks on paper, because a) YHOO stock was so high at the time that the $3.8B wasn't actually all that dilutive, and b) buying GeoCities ensured Yahoo was the #1 destination online, and thus we could command a disproportionate share of ad revenue. If you wanna look at a really silly deal that Yahoo did, how about the…

You're forgetting the opportunity cost to buy other things.

In 1997, Yahoo turned down the offer to acquire Google for $1,000,000.

That was not a good call. I wonder how many other missed opportunities those $3.8B had.

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#115
post #14

I worked for Tripod.com back in the day, which eventually sold to Lycos for about $60M, just a few months before Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.6B. Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.

Remember Angelfire as well?

My first actually-online website was on Angelfire. I’ll never see it again, because:

1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity,

2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and

3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented character in its name, the entire operation failed — and deleted all of the data that was to be moved.)

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#116
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there anything like this for Homestead.com? I can't remember any Geocities URL's

Homestead is still up and running, though we did start culling sites that had no visits and no logins a while ago. (I was a co-founder of Homestead.)

You guys had the BEST loading animations, with that dancing h-house.

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#117
That was fantastic. What the heck happened to Yahoo. They were awesome. They had the best search page/directory, they had the best webmail. Then one day they decide that they're a media company and all of the usefulness died and Google picked up right where Yahoo left off, with what? A good search engine and the best webmail.

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#118
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember Angelfire as well?

My first actually-online website was on Angelfire. I’ll never see it again, because: 1. It was auto-deleted after a period of inactivity, 2. The Wayback Machine doesn’t know about it, and 3. My local copy was deleted by Microsoft thanks to a bug in Windows. (I was moving a folder across my home network from my old Windows 98SE computer to an XP box, and when the move operation encountered a folder with an accented ch…

What exactly did you have on this website?

Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is an act of war. :O!

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#119
post #98
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah Instagram, Facebook, twitter, tumblr... You really think that all the google ads you've seen in your life (let alone on a given site) add up to a return of $15? I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad. This space can be lucrative, but every success is over the bodies of many failed companies. This phase we're in now is equally silly.

> I'd be much more likely to give geocities $15 for a premium account than I would be to ever click on an ad. I really wish this was a more common attitude. You could make it happen for less than $15. At a value of $1/CPM to a website owner displaying one ad. $5 would cover one user for ~5,000 page views. ~10,000 page views taking into account the 50% of users using adblock today, value equal to double. Imagine you p…

I don't understand why ad-driven companies don't offer an option for premium. I would lobby hard for Facebook if I could pay to preserve my privacy and not see ads.

Re: Yahoo buys GeoCities (1999)

#120
post #14

I worked for Tripod.com back in the day, which eventually sold to Lycos for about $60M, just a few months before Yahoo bought Geocities for $3.6B. Needless to say, maybe we should have held out a bit longer. The late 90's were a strange time indeed.

isp/~username was where the cool kids hung out.
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