Editor’s note (March 2026): This article is part of Blog Herald’s editorial archive. Originally published in 2006, it has been reviewed and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance for today’s readers.
At its peak, GeoCities was the third most visited site on the entire web. Think about what that meant: millions of ordinary people, most of them with no technical background, had carved out their own corners of the internet. Tiled backgrounds, auto-playing MIDI files, guestbooks, hit counters — it was chaotic and often ugly, but it was genuinely theirs.
The philosophical premise behind GeoCities was powerful: publishing online should be democratic. You shouldn’t need money or technical expertise to have a presence on the internet. That idea attracted tens of millions of people throughout the late 1990s. Then Yahoo! acquired GeoCities in 1999 for $3.57 billion, and a decade later, shut the whole thing down. At least 38 million user-created pages disappeared overnight.
That moment should have been a turning point. Instead, it became a pattern.
Google picked up the torch — then dropped it
In February 2006, Google launched Page Creator: a free, no-code website builder available to anyone with a Gmail account. One hundred megabytes of hosting, drag-and-drop simplicity, no ads, no fees. Observers at the time called it “a GeoCities for 2006,” and the comparison was fair. It felt like Google was picking up the democratic publishing ideal that GeoCities had embodied.
By 2009, Google had quietly shut it down. Users were migrated to Google Sites — a more corporate-facing product that stripped away much of what made the original appealing. Page Creator joined what is now a sprawling graveyard of discontinued Google products, memorialized by the website Killed by Google: Reader, Inbox, Stadia, and dozens more.
More recently, in 2024, Google shut down the free website builder built into Google Business Profile — the one that millions of small business owners had been quietly relying on as their primary web presence. One day their site existed. The next, visitors saw a “page not found” error.
The sequence is always the same. A platform lowers the barrier to entry. Creators invest time, effort, and identity. The platform changes direction. Creators pay the cost.
The illusion of the free platform
What makes this pattern so persistent is that the trade-off is genuinely appealing, especially at the start. Free tools, instant setup, built-in audiences — these are real advantages. The problem isn’t the convenience. The problem is mistaking convenience for permanence.
Every free platform makes the same implicit offer: we give you the tools, you give us the real estate. Your content, your audience, your URLs — these live on borrowed ground. The moment the platform determines that product no longer serves its strategic interests, it’s gone. You have no say.
This isn’t unique to Google. MySpace, Tumblr under Yahoo, Vine, Google+ — each time, creators who had invested deeply in a platform found themselves dispossessed. The infrastructure they had built on simply ceased to exist, or changed so dramatically it amounted to the same thing.
Why the stakes are higher now
In 2006, most people using free web tools were hobbyists. Today’s creators are building real businesses, cultivating meaningful audiences, and generating serious income from their work. The platform question has moved from philosophical to existential.
The current landscape presents a familiar version of the same trade-off. Substack offers remarkable ease of entry — start writing in minutes, reach readers directly, begin monetising without any technical overhead. It’s genuinely valuable. But Substack takes a 10% cut of subscription revenue, and more fundamentally, the platform controls distribution. Creators don’t own the relationship with their readers in any structural sense — they rent access to it.
Ghost takes a different position. As an open-source non-profit with a stated mission around press freedom, it lets creators keep 100% of revenue, own their subscriber data, and even run their own version of the code. WordPress, powering roughly 43% of the web as of 2025, offers similar ownership advantages. Both come with more technical overhead — but what you build is genuinely yours.
The split isn’t really about features. It’s about what kind of asset you’re creating. Are you a tenant, or an owner?
The mistake creators keep repeating
The problem isn’t choosing Substack, or Medium, or any other platform. Many of these tools are excellent for specific purposes, and there’s real strategic value in meeting audiences where they already are.
The mistake is treating a platform’s current generosity as a structural guarantee.
When Google Page Creator migrated to Google Sites, years of established links and web addresses broke. When GeoCities closed, a massive, irreplaceable record of early internet culture simply vanished for anyone who hadn’t manually archived their work. The people who lost the most weren’t naive — they had simply trusted that a product backed by a major company would stick around.
What’s worth sitting with is a simple question: if the platform you publish on disappeared tomorrow — acquired, shut down, pivoted — what would remain? If the honest answer is “not much,” that’s the thing worth addressing.
What the GeoCities era actually points toward
Looking back, GeoCities represented something philosophically purer than most of what followed. People weren’t optimising for an algorithm or chasing distribution. They were making things and putting them online because they wanted to. There’s a reason Neocities — an explicitly GeoCities-inspired modern platform — still attracts users who want that feeling back.
The ideal the early web pointed toward was one where ordinary people could publish, own, and control their work without depending on a corporation to keep the lights on. The tools to get closer to that ideal have never been better: self-hosted WordPress, Ghost, static site generators, your own domain, your own email list. None of these are glamorous solutions. They require more friction, more maintenance, more upfront investment. But they are yours in a way no free platform can match.
The history from GeoCities to Google Page Creator to every free publishing tool that has come and gone since is a story about the seduction of convenience — and the recurring cost of confusing a platform’s interests with your own.
Build on platforms where they serve your growth. But build something you own as the foundation. The creators who understood this early are the ones still publishing today, on their own terms, with their audiences intact. That lesson was available in 1999. It was available in 2006. It’s still available now.
