Claim:   GeoCities web sites are about to be shut down with no advance notice.

Status:   False.

Example:   [Collected on the Internet, 2001]

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( 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."

Origins:   This Internet alert was first received in the last week of April 2001. Yahoo's public relations department swears there's absolutely nothing to the rumor, and even if you don't trust them, there are very strong points that need to be made against it (aside from the fact that the alleged Yahoo! "memo" is written as a third-person news story).

GeoCities is a free web hosting service owned by Yahoo! Inc. Those who choose to maintain GeoCities web sites do so at no cost, with Yahoo! making its money through the sale of advertising banners placed on each page.

In early April 2001, Yahoo! announced it was putting together a special effort to sell adult-themed material and had increased the number of porn films available on its shopping pages (where the company gets a cut of the sales). This was not a new area of commerce for Yahoo! — it had been quietly vending blue movies and books through its site for two years. The publicity arising from this announcement prompted an outcry of criticism which clearly took Yahoo! aback. Within a week the company reversed itself, announcing on 13 April it would cease selling adult products.

Dropping out of the adult videos and DVDs business may not be the end of Yahoo!'s disengagement from porn. Yahoo! also announced it would stop accepting banner ads, classifieds, and auction items with adult themes and promised to more aggressively police sex-related message boards and clubs. The company has, according to members, quietly reconfigured its adult-themed online clubs and chat rooms, removing links to them and making them harder to find. Many members believe Yahoo! wants the clubs off the site altogether.

GeoCities web sites would be a particular area of concern if Yahoo! were to decide to get serious about shedding connections to smut. Although nudity and pornography are expressly forbidden on pages housed by this web host, the company hasn't previously taken down violators' sites unless someone complained about them directly.

So what does all that mean in terms of this particular rumor about GeoCities as a whole being shut down? It could well be entirely reasonable to assume Yahoo! will begin doing away with adult-themed GeoCities web sites. Because these sites are a violation of GeoCities' Terms of Service, there is nothing to bar the company from disabling such pages without giving prior notice to the folks who have worked to create them.

However, even if Yahoo! does take this step, that is still a far cry from doing away with all of Geocities. Folks who maintain nudity- and porn-free GeoCities sites should therefore not be overly worried that the result of all their hard work will be vaporized without notice.

On the other hand, Yahoo! has been experiencing business slowdowns of late, thanks to the sagging Internet economy. Moreover, the collapse of the dotcoms translates to far fewer dollars going into online advertising, and it is that advertising that underwrites the cost of operating GeoCities. If maintaining GeoCities as a free web hosting ever becomes a drain on Yahoo! instead of a moneymaker, the company might well choose to discontinue that service. But it could just as easily attempt to move towards charging site operators a small hosting fee. Or it could choose to carry the loss, figuring that the negative publicity inherent to dropping GeoCities outweighs any loss it is taking on hosting and that the decline in online advertising revenues is but a temporary condition that will correct itself as the market recovers.

One thing needs be kept in mind about all of this: public opinion is a powerful force. Were Yahoo! to choose to shut down GeoCities, it could hardly do so in a midnight raid fashion without losing an inestimable chunk of its online credibility. Expect a company of Yahoo!'s size to behave in a responsible fashion — if it does eventually discontinue its GeoCities free web hosting service, it will do so only after giving fair and reasonable notice. It could hardly do otherwise, given how dependent its success as a business is on maintaining the online community's good opinion.

The good opinion of any company can be damaged by gossip and wild-eyed, baseless rumors. Which, as it turns out, is what this warning was.

The "memo" quoted in the e-mailed warning wasn't a memo from Yahoo! at all; it was text lifted from a 12 April 2001 New York Times article detailing stock market analyst downgrades and supplying statements from Yahoo! about how it planned to manage its business better. There was, however, one key difference between what was being circulated in e-mail as issuing from Yahoo! and what was actually said in that article: The "They will be closed" tagline didn't come from the NYT article — it was the e-mail writer's invention.

The savvy netizen should probably conclude the text of the e-mail warning was a Chicken Little ("The sky is falling!") reaction to this New York Times article. There was no secret memo from Yahoo! detailing a nefarious plot the company had afoot. Instead, the most likely scenario behind the creation of this scare has someone parsing the NYT article as meaning GeoCities would shut and probably forwarding it to someone else, with that someone else writing a hysterical call to arms based on a "memo," throwing in a tagline that seemed appropriate, packaging it up, and sending it winging on its way. Thus are rumors created and 'They will be closed' "memos" fabricated out of misparsings of news stories.

Yes, under this new tighter focus, Yahoo! could decide to drop GeoCities because, thanks to the decline in online advertising revenue, that division might no longer be paying for itself, but it could just as easily prove out they'd want to go to a fee-based model, remaking it into a paying concern. Or we could just chalk this whole thing up to a misreading of a news article by a hysterical bell-ringer:

The key part of the New York Times article read:

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.

Reading the above very carefully, we find that the GeoCities service is not going to be part of this planned streamlining: Yahoo! is making it exempt. In other words, the "memo" someone decided to send up an alarm over said the exact opposite of what that person had understood it to say. "Other things are going under the axe," says the text above, "but not GeoCities."

Could GeoCities eventually go the way of the dinosaurs? Yes, of course. Could Yahoo! someday choose to reverse its decision to protect it? Certainly. But for now it's clear Yahoo!'s intent is to preserve the service, even going so far as exempting it from the overall streamlining it is currently engaging in.

One final note: Yahoo! gained a reminder of the importance of public opinion in April 2001 when news of it expanding its adult-themed aspects of its business was met with condemnation. It is thus now highly unlikely to take a controversial step such as discontinuing its GeoCities service without fully doing its public relations homework first.

Barbara "Yahoo!'s afraid of Virginia Wolff" Mikkelson

Last updated:   4 December 2007

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  Sources:

    Bergstein, Brian.   "Users Say Yahoo Quietly Extending Porn Crackdown to Chat Rooms."

    The Associated Press.   1 May 2001.

    Hansell, Saul.   "Yahoo Reports Quarterly Loss and Schedules Round of Cuts."

    The New York Times.   12 April 2001   (p. A1).

    Huffstutter, P.J.   "Yahoo's Search for Profit Leads to Pornography."

    Los Angeles Times.   11 April 2001   (p. A1).

    Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.   "Yahoo's Blunder to Push Porn Quickly Fixed."

    19 April 2001   (p. C3).