Back in the day, most people who got into web development at one point had a geocities website. I had one at one point.
Then in 1999, Geocities.com was sold to Yahoo in a deal that I think was worth around US$2.87 billion dollars.
Now they are shutting geocities down on 26th October 2009 according to this page.
Maybe it might be a good ploy if it encourages people to take up the offer of Yahoo’s paid hosting service.
But if they do actually go ahead and pull the plug on geocities, I think it would be a monumental waste of money. Pageviews and advertising reach should matter to Yahoo, but then they have made a lot of what I consider very poor business decisions. Getting rid of pictures on profiles at one point, and countless others. They seriously could have crushed Facebook, they had the power to do it, but they blew it. And don’t get me started on them effectively signing away their search division for x number of years. Again, not a particularly good move. Even though their share price has fallen a lot since the Microsoft offer, I still think they should put Jerry Yang as the head of the company, and have a team of members of founders of some of the companies they acquired to help him rebuild yahoo. I think the only thing Yahoo has left going for it at the moment, is Yahoo messenger and yahoo email.

This is a rather interesting article on why Yahoo should surrender and use Google advertising, in much the same way as a number of other smaller search engines have. It mentions that as a result, Yahoo could increase their average search revenue from $0.10 to $0.17 adding US$1.5 billion to their bottom line. I cant see this ever happening in the immediate feature, I think we are still in the early stages where each major player Google, Yahoo and MSN will continue to do battle for market supremacy. I would also not like to see this ever happen from a webmaster point of view, as the Yahoo Publisher Network is a viable alternative to Google adsense and serves to keep Adsense competitive and maintaining a decent revenue share split with their publishers. Currently the revenue share percentage is not openly disclosed and is just the subject of speculation.