When Yahoo bought GeoCities for $3.6 billion in January 1999, it was widely considered a coup.
The Web hosting service gave many Internet users their first websites. With 19 million unique visitors per month, GeoCities was the third-most visited site on the Web behind AOL(AOL) and Yahoo in 1998.
But social media sites like MySpace and ultimately Facebook(FB) quickly overshadowed GeoCities, which fell out of favor with users.
Yahoo closed down GeoCities in 2009. Many believe GeoCities and its millions of users represented a missed opportunity for Yahoo to evolve the service into a more modern social network.
