Net Nostalgia

Remember GeoCities? In 1997 it was one of the first and most popular places to create your own free homepage. GeoCities was also the fifth most popular website in existence, with only over 500,000 homepages created. Where is it now? Yahoo bought Geocities two years later and commercialized the homepages with advertising- resulting in a death sentence. With web hosting becoming affordable, the need for "free" homepages littered with ads vanished. Geocities accounts are now only used for outdated information, and to upload/download illegal mp3 files from...

Did you "Altavista" people? Not as catchy as "googling", Altavista was the first real effort to index the World Wide Web. It was popular because it was one of the few search engines that actually came up with good search results. That is until the companies and spammers got wise and Altavista's search results were compromised. Eventually some company named Google found a way to prioritize web pages more intelligently, thus keeping spam out more efficiently. Where is it now? Altavista never tried to recover, having their market share drop to almost nothing. Yahoo! is now the proud owner of this piece of history as well.

Sadly, these are two cases where aggressive advertising systematically killed entire companies; one from within and one from without.