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GeoCities Japan Is Finally Shutting Down (qz.com)
"A decade ago, internet users who grew up with Web 1.0 bid a fond farewell to Sunset Strip, Rodeo Drive, Colosseum, and other 'neighborhoods' on web-hosting service GeoCities, when Yahoo announced it was shutting the main site down," writes Isabella Steger for Quartz. "Now Japanese GeoCities fans will face the same fate." From the report: Yahoo Japan announced today (Oct. 1) that it will shut down (link in Japanese) its GeoCities service in March 2019, 22 years after its launch. The company said in a statement that it was hard to encapsulate in one word the reason for the shut down, but that profitability and technological issues were primary factors. It added that it was full of "regret" for the fate of the immense amount of information that would be lost as a result of the service's closure. Japan is the only country where the web hosting service remained in operation. Like the main GeoCities, the Japanese service was also organized around different themed neighborhoods. For example, websites in the Silicon Valley neighborhood were tech-focused, while those in Berkeley focused on education.
For a similar experience to Geocities, just visit ANY OTHER Japanese website. They over-invested in cellphones and gaming systems in the late 90's at the cost of the home PC market. The Xennials never became casual computer nerds, so your average Japanese person UNDER 40 is about as computer literate as your average American OVER 40. The ones who aren't are the social outcasts, which is why nerds are still sort of niche/taboo.
Geocities was once a well-known name, Internet-wise. They could have offered a simple CMS interface in addition to raw HTML, and been what Facebook is, or at least what Blogger is (now owned by Google).
Context-sensitive banner ads at the top or bottom could have paid for it because Geocities was already divided by topic categories, simplifying targeted ads, which advertisers love.
But Yahoo purchased it and ruined it like everything else they ruined. Yahoo had their long fingers in almost every category*: search, social media, blogging, self-hosting, email, shopping (Amazon-esque), discussion groups, and others. Then fucked up each and every one. Their train of fuckups is so long, one thinks it may have been intentional: somebody at the top must have been afraid of success.
Yahoo was handed the Golden Keys to the Kingdom on a red pillow, but swallowed them and then shitted out of the back of the jet on the way to The Gate To The Internet.
It's comparable to the record company who turned down the early Beatles because "guitars are falling out of style"; except Yahoo turned down the Beatles, the Who, Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Three Dog Night, and Aretha Franklin.
* or at least early versions of them
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