Geocitiesus Communitaris
Family : community
Sub-family : Web-theme village
URL : http://www.geocities.com
The name Geocities is mentioned far less frequently in
the world of electronic commerce than that of Yahoo! It
began in 1995 when a site known only to the initiated
in Europe began to offer an e-mail service and free unconditional
server space (for individuals, associations and businesses)
at a time when Website hosting cost several thousand francs
a year. In the space of a few months, tens of thousands
of internauts rushed to take advantage of the opportunity
whilst the service was still free. Today, there are several
million subscribers to the service, which is still free
in its basic version (which is mostly clogged). And these
millions of internauts are regrouped by subjects, according
to their interests. The different neighbourhoods of this
mosaic of online communities are called Wall Street, Paris,
Motorcity ...
The economic model of Geocities remained a mystery
for a long time, as there was no advertising on the
majority of pages, since they had been created by the
users without Geocities' help. Since the beginning of
1998, Geocities has revealed the direction in which it
is moving, as each time you connect to one of its community's
pages, an advertising window opens on top at the same
time. All Geocities' members are offered the chance to
open an online store, this time by paying. A directory
listing all its Websites has been created and its probably
the largest in the world, from the point of view of the
number of sites listed (2 million).
The digital butterfly as part of the network
Geocities represents another type of Internet family:
communities. There are two ways of looking at selling
by Internet. Either you wait until a gap in the market
presents itself, and set up a commercial site to meet
that need, or you try to contact the Internet user as
soon as he connects to what are known as communities,
to meet like-minded people and research information. This
approach has two advantages : as well as allowing you
to reach a predefined group of people on the Web, their
e-mail addresses often reveal a certain amount of socio-economic
data. Given the first obstacle facing the cyber-salesman,
the anonymity of visitors to his site, the strategic position
of communities becomes obvious.
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