[1] On January 28, 1999, it was acquired by Yahoo!,[2] at which time it was reportedly the third-most visited website on the World Wide Web.

[9] GeoCities began during mid-1995 as BHI, which stood for Beverly Hills Internet, a small web hosting and development company in southern California.

In mid-1995, the company decided to offer users (thereafter known as "Homesteaders") the ability to develop free home pages within those neighborhoods, with 2 MB of space provided at the time.

Chat, bulletin boards, and other elements of "community" were added soon afterward, helping foster rapid growth.

On July 5, 1995, GeoCities added additional cities, including "CapitolHill", "Paris", "SiliconValley", and "Tokyo".

[10] By December 1995, the company, which now had a total of 14 neighborhoods, was registering thousands of Homesteaders a day and getting more than six million monthly page views.

The company decided to emphasize increasing membership and community, and on December 15, 1995, BHI became known as GeoCities after having also been named Geopages.

[13] Over time, many companies, including Yahoo!, invested extensively in GeoCities and, with the introduction of paid premium services, the site continued to grow.

By June 1997, GeoCities was the fifth most popular website on the Web, and by October of that year the company had registered its millionth Homesteader.

[citation needed] During June 1998, in an effort to increase brand awareness, GeoCities introduced a watermark to user Web pages.

The watermark, much like an onscreen graphic on some television channels, was a transparent floating GIF image that used JavaScript to stay displayed on the bottom right corner of the browser screen.

The implementation of the watermark preceded the widespread adoption of CSS and the standardized Document Object Model and had cross-browser problems.

[4][16][17] The acquisition proved unpopular; users began to quit en masse in protest at the new terms of service specified by Yahoo!

During 2001, amid speculation by analysts that GeoCities was not yet profitable (it having declared an $8 million loss for the final quarter of 1998), Yahoo!

[21] During 2001, a rumor began that GeoCities was to be terminated; the chain e-mail making that claim cited an article in The New York Times that stated the opposite.

no longer offered free web page hosting, except in Japan, where the service continued for ten more years.

Rich Skrenta, the CEO of Blekko, posted on Twitter an offer to take over GeoCities from Yahoo!

[28] In response to the termination, rival Web hosting services began to compete for the sites formerly displayed by GeoCities.

[39][40] In its original form, site users selected a so-called "city" in which to list the hyperlinks to their Web pages.

[6] In 2019, indie developer Jay Tholen released the game Hypnospace Outlaw, which was heavily influenced by GeoCities.

During 1999, a complaint was instituted against GeoCities stating that the corporation violated the provisions of the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914, specifically 15 U.S.C.

Subsequently, a consent order was entered into, prohibiting GeoCities from misrepresenting the purpose for which it collects and/or uses personal identifying information from consumers.

[46] The problem of GeoCities was that it placed a privacy statement on its New Member Application Form and on its website promising that it would never give personally identifying information to anyone without the user's permission.