"Geocities' Cyberworld Is Vibrant, but Can It Make Money?"
July 13, 1998
By SAUL HANSELL
nytimes.com
Rick Brown did not set out to be anyone's hero. Simply wanting to learn a little more about the
Internet, he signed on two years ago with Geocities, a service that gives people free space to
publish their own pages on the World Wide Web.
Some people use their Geocities sites to show the world
their children, their poetry or their model train collection.
Brown built a tribute to Monty Python, the British comedy
troupe.
His Web site started slowly, but Brown, 34, a grocery store
merchandiser who lives in Bridgeport, Conn., kept adding
Python memorabilia, sound clips, scripts and pictures. Soon
the site took on a life of its own, and Geocities began
promoting it as one its "landmark" pages.
By June, when he had a falling-out with the service over a
promotion effort, his site had attracted more than 100,000
visitors.
Brown's experience exemplifies the paradox of Geocities: The service is attracting an impressive and
growing number of members and visitors, yet as it moves toward a public stock offering, it is
struggling to formulate a credible image as a viable business.
The founder of Geocities, David Bohnett, says that the sheer scale of the service's operation and
popularity would have been unimaginable when he started experimenting with the Internet in 1994.
As of June, more than 2 million members had created personal Web sites consisting of more than
15 million pages on nearly every imaginable topic.
Organized into 40 virtual "neighborhoods," these sites add up to the
third-most-visited domain on the Web, attracting 14 million viewers
in April, the most recent month for which figures are available.
The audience for Geocities has been growing at twice the speed of
the average Web site, according to Media Metrix, which measures
traffic on the Internet.
Now the company, based in Santa Monica, Calif., is going public.
The investment bankers promoting the initial public offering hope
investors will be drawn to the potential of Geocities' vast audience
and to the low overhead of publishing a site created by millions of
volunteers.
They also hope that investors will not be discouraged by financial
statements that suggest only the weakest vital signs of a going
concern.
Of course, as the company begins its road show over the next few
weeks, it will probably talk of many plans to build its audience, to
sell more advertising and to extract fees from at least some
members for certain services.
But it is not clear whether the service can build its business without
alienating its members. For example, it was a promotional effort
known as a watermark that set off the feud with Brown.
The watermark is a translucent image of the Geocities logo that
hovers in the lower right hand corner of the pages of its members,
like the "ghost" logos that identify television channels. The
watermark's purpose is to encourage people entering one Geocities
site to try other sites on the service.
But many Geocities members complained that the watermark made
their pages load more slowly on visitors' browsers, cluttered their
screens and obfuscated links.
So using the very tools that Geocities had given them to build their
Web sites, some members created anti-watermark pages, chat
rooms and mailing lists. When Brown turned the front page of his
Monty Python site black in protest, Geocities stopped featuring his page. Other members got wind
of this and turned his case into a rallying point for the anti-watermark campaign.
The whole situation, Brown said, reminds him of Monty Python's sketch in which a pet-store patron
tries to return a dead parrot. "The customer has a valid complaint, and the management uses every
trick available to avoid facing that fact," Brown said.
Such are the promise and the peril that come with trying to build a business by giving a megaphone
to millions of people. Geocities is one of a growing number of "online communities" -- sites or
services that allow people to publish Web pages and communicate with one another by chatting,
sending e-mail and so forth. Such community sites now make up six of the 20 most popular sites on
the Web. Geocities is the largest, followed in descending popularity by Tripod, Angelfire, Hotmail,
Switchboard and Xoom.
Some advertisers are wary of placing their product next to chat that as likely as not will turn sexual
-- or on a page that today is an affable tribute to Monty Python and tomorrow is a diatribe against
the host service.
"What gives us a nervous twitch is the fear that if a user has a bad experience they will think
negatively on our clients," said Jonathan Adams, a media buyer for Ogilvy One, the online agency
for Ogilvy & Mather. "Even if 99.9 percent of the sites are squeaky clean, it's that tenth of 1 percent
that will wind up in the CEO's lap."
Bohnett, who has championed the right to free expression of minorities as a
board member of the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, says
that playing censor in chief for 2 million people weighs heavily on him.
"A lot of what I'm doing has to do with being gay and part of a minority that
has not had an equal voice in society," Bohnett said in an interview in March.
"But we have to balance freedom of expression with commercial viability.
Otherwise all of this will go away."
Bohnett has declined to comment on the watermark or any other matter
recently because Geocities is in a required "quiet period" related to its
planned stock offering. In May, Bohnett hired Thomas Evans, publisher of
U.S. News & World Report, to be Geocities' chief executive. Bohnett
remains chairman.
The impulse that created Geocities was more expressive than commercial. In
the spring of 1994, Bohnett took a break from a career in software
marketing after his longtime companion died of AIDS. Intrigued by the Internet, Bohnett and a
friend, John Renzer, bought a $5,000 computer powerful enough to serve up Web pages and
published a little site with a live picture of the Intersection of Hollywood and Vine and a few other
locales.
Within a year, they seized on the idea of giving users free home pages and organizing them into
"virtual" cities, arranged loosely by topic. Thus, when a new "homesteader," in Geocities' lingo,
wants to set up a page, he or she selects a lot in a particular city. Those who are interested in cars
move into Motor City; jazz fans choose Bourbon Street.
The most heavily populated of the 40 cities are Silicon Valley, about computers, and South Beach,
a vast spring break-style party. But the most popular destination among visiting Web surfers is
Hollywood, the home of most of the fan pages, including Brown's Monty Python page.
Most of the sites are simple, even hokey affairs, offering photos of pets, love poems, pie recipes
and other matter that lived between the refrigerator and a magnet in the past. But some are much
more elaborate.
"If you're a bank clerk by day and a Smashing Pumpkins fan by night, this gives you an opportunity
to express yourself," Bohnett said.
Once they expose themselves to the world, Geocities members
closely watch the count of how many visitors their sites attract, and
they express glee at receiving an e-mail from a far-off place.
"I was a ham radio operator in high school," Bohnett said. "It was
exciting to collect postcards from people you talked to around the
world. That is a lot of what the Web is about."
Even more surprising, people started sending e-mail to their virtual
neighbors to comment on their sites and offer help.
Renzer, now the company's chief technical officer, said, "People
actually go out of their way to become block captains, to join
welcome wagons and to monitor chat rooms so they can have a
neighborhood that is safe and clean."
Geocities now has 1,500 volunteer community leaders who help
other members and watch out for offensive behavior.
"The community leader program is the perfect environment for
folks with a 'helper complex,"' said Sherri Kaufmann, a housewife
in rural Minnesota. She originally joined Geocities to show off
pictures of her 10 children. Now she spends an hour a day on the
computer in her kitchen watching over her corner of the "Picket
Fence" neighborhood.
"We truly are a community of neighbors who help each other out,"
Ms. Kaufmann said. "I have made many friends here. Recently, my
father became ill, and I was overwhelmed by the letters from the
friends I have made at Geocities."
But even more powerful than the common human urge to help a
neighbor, however virtual, is the sexual urge. Volunteers and Geocities' small staff spend most of
their time rooting out pornography that sprouts constantly on members' pages, as well as other
illegal or objectionable material.
"We've gone through seemingly endless debates about content guidelines," Bohnett said.
And, still, its rules are uncomfortable compromises: Political opinion is OK; hate speech is not. You
can have a page about sex but no pictures of naked people, unless they are classic artworks or on
pages about nudism as a life style. Most members can criticize Geocities on their pages somewhat,
but community leaders cannot.
Similarly, Geocities has been in a constant battle with its members about how much of their pages it
controls for advertising and promotion. Other protests arose when the service began superimposing
advertisements over members' pages.
Geocities has not been able to fill the ad space that it does have. Last year, the company had only
six advertisers. Now, after a reorganization of its sales force, it says it has more than 100. But its
members' pages are only about 25 percent sold.
Now, with a new management team drawn from larger media
companies, Geocities is trying to find ways to turn its audience
into cash. It has tinkered with the design of the site to create
more places for ads and to keep surfers longer at Geocities,
especially on those pages that attract ad rates with a high cost
for every thousand visitors, like pages about cars and other
expensive items.
And it is coming up with other sources of revenue. There are
deals with online merchants like Amazon.com, which will sell
books recommended on member pages, paying commissions to
both the member and Geocities. There are services that for a
fee let the most dedicated members build more ambitious and
complex sites. And for those who want to set up business in
cyberspace, it has started a program called Geoshops to display
online storefronts for which it charges monthly fees starting at $25 a month.
Taken together, Geocities hopes all these initiatives will quadruple its revenue from $4.6 million last
year to a range of $20 million to $25 million this year, Bohnett said in March. Stephen L. Hansen,
the company's chief financial officer, said in March that he expected Geocities to break even next
year.
But this rush to make money is leaving some members behind.
"Right now, I feel they are pushing commercialism a little too much with all the home pages
inundated with ads and links to ads," said Sharyn Gleaves, who has built an elaborate site devoted
to drumming around campfires.
Indeed, Brown says he is about to move his Monty Python site to another service.
Yet Renzer, the co-founder, argues that making money is just another aspect of Geocities' virtual
vision.
"Everything in the real world should be mirrored in Geocities," he said. "What do you do? You go to
bars. You talk to people. You find a date. But you also go shopping, and you have a job."
And, for that matter, you have virtual protests, boycotts and heroes as well.
|
