Do you remember GeoCities? When it was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 for $3.5 billion, it was the third most-visited site on the World Wide Web.

There probably was never a completely clear business model behind GeoCities. Originally it was a free content hosting system. Users could create “homesteads” within specific neighborhoods (with names like “CapeCanaveral” and “EnchantedForest”) without registering new domain names. The building tools were rudimentary but clearly effective-- at its peak there were more than 38 million individual sites registered.

When Yahoo! tried to monetize the service, users found alternatives such as facebook.

ZDNet editor Rupert Goodwin commented: “It was a fascinating experiment...I think GeoCities was the first proof that you could have something really popular and still not make any money on the internet.”