In its original form, site users selected a "city" in which to place their web pages. The "cities" were named after real cities or regions according to their content — for example, computer-related sites were placed in "SiliconValley" and those dealing with entertainment were assigned to "Hollywood" — hence the name of the site. Ten years after Yahoo! bought GeoCities, the company announced that it would shut down the United States GeoCities service on October 26, 2009, and GeoCities websites actually became unavailable the next day.
There were at least 38 million user-built pages on GeoCities before it was shut down. The GeoCities Japan version of the service is still available.
In January 1999, near the peak of the dot-com bubble, GeoCities was purchased by Yahoo! for $3.57 billion in stock, with Yahoo! taking control on May 28. The acquisition proved extremely unpopular; users began to leave en masse in protest at the new terms of service put out by Yahoo! for GeoCities.
So Bohnett made his mega-fortune the same way Mark Cuban did - by peddling a billion-dollar dog with fleas to Yahoo at the top of the bubble. At least GeoCities worked. Cuban's company Broadcast.com was a technolgical disaster and was dismantled within 18 months by enraged Yahoo staff, several of whom I worked with later.