Geocities

Long before YouTube came into existence, there was a site called Geocities.

The site was launched around 1995 and became quite popular since it was a free content provider. More specifically, it was a web hosting site.

Unfortunately, this gave way to sites with really annoying MIDI music, animated GIFs in horrific quality (and many of them), really bad color schemes, and many other quirks many of these pages had.

Tough times came in when the site was bought out by Yahoo! in January 1999. Several people started leaving the site, even though it was the third most visited in the world at the time. Yahoo! had its fair share of mismanagement, such as changing its terms of service so that all content uploaded to Geocities would be owned by Yahoo.

The site was shut down in October 2009, since Yahoo! was unable to keep the site profitable. Luckily (or unluckily, depending on how you view the situation), nearly a terabyte of data was archived just before Geocities closed its doors.

Currently, only the Japanese version is still up.