Yahoo Buys GeoCities

JAN 28 1999 · 12:00

Sunglasses drop. Deal with it. Yahoo pays $3.57B for GeoCities at the absolute top of the bubble. Place: Yahoo HQ, Sunnyvale, California Figures: Tim Koogle, Yahoo CEO · David Bohnett, GeoCities CEO · Jerry Yang and David Filo, Yahoo founders Yahoo announces on 28 January 1999 that it will acquire GeoCities (see [[geocities-launches-1994]]) for approximately $3.57 billion in an all-stock transaction. It is the LARGEST WEB ACQUISITION in history to that point. Yahoo stock, then trading at a split-adjusted peak, makes the math arithmetically credible; the dotcom correction eighteen months later will not. GeoCities at the time of acquisition: 4.6 million homesteaders, the third most-visited site on the web behind AOL and Yahoo's own properties, an estimated 38 million pages by year's end. The GIF library that comes with the acquisition is, on a per-byte basis, the largest single archive of animated images on the consumer internet. Nobody at Yahoo, then or later, has a clear plan for what to do with it. Video: Bohnett tells Brian McCullough how the neighborhoods grew, why the IPO and Yahoo deal happened, and what got broken after.