By May 1998, people had built more than 1.9 million free websites on GeoCities, up from about 10,000 in October 1995. The company called them Homesteaders. Each site sat on a numbered street in a themed neighborhood, so a fan page about movies lived near other movie pages. In April 1998 GeoCities drew more than 14 million visitors. That made it one of the most visited sites on the web when it filed to go public that summer.

Neighborhoods of Strangers

David Bohnett and John Rezner started the company in 1994 as Beverly Hills Internet. The idea was a city of personal pages, organized by interest. Homesteaders got free space and simple tools, and in return GeoCities sold ads on the pages they built. By the time of the filing, Homesteaders had made an estimated 15 million pages. Many of them were the first thing their authors had ever published.

Bought, Then Bulldozed

GeoCities priced its offering at $17 a share in August 1998 and listed on Nasdaq as GCTY. Five months later, in January 1999, Yahoo agreed to buy it for about $3.57 billion in stock. The deal closed that May. Under Yahoo the neighborhoods faded, and users moved on to blogs and social networks. Yahoo shut down GeoCities in the United States in October 2009, and volunteer archivists rushed to save as many pages as they could.

Cover: View of the Town of Maassluis, Johan Barthold Jongkind. Art Institute of Chicago, public domain. Chosen for a small town and its streets (a city of home pages).