I'd like to find whatever numbers are available and current regarding
the number of users/web sites on Yahoo!'s Geocities service. If there
is anything on subscription versus free users, that would be great.
Visitor traffic numbers to the site would alo be interesting (to
Geocities specifically). And, of course, the more recent numbers the
better.

Hi Ev,

Yahoo Geocities is reported to have gotten 27,751,000 unique visitors
in March of this year, for an active reach percentage of %23.13. Time
spent onsite is somewhat low, with an average of 8:21 minutes per user
per month. For Yahoo in general, more than 134 million unique
consumers visited Yahoo in March, which is more than 52 percent of the
total active at home "Internet universe" which Nielsen defines as 258
million users, for some reason.

These stats were released from a study done by Nielsen/NetRatings
MarketView Report which was summarized in a press release in Yahoo's
biz site. The information/press release was current as of this
morning, it looks like. The statistics themselves were collected in
march of this year.

[source: http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/020508/80047_1.html ]

Searchenginewatch.com has a good exploration into the netratings
systems here:      http://searchenginewatch.com/reports/netratings.html

NielsenNetratings is here:
     http://www.nielsen-netratings.com/
and their monthly stats report is here:
     http://pm.netratings.com/nnpm/owa/NRpublicreports.toppropertiesmonthly
                     
Yahoo is notorious for keeping their cards close to their chest with
regards to the number of GeoCities customers they acquired who are now
becoming a part of the Yahoo revenue stream. Most recently, GeoCities
users were told they would need to become paid subscribers in order to
use FTP to load information onto their web pages. Yahoo claims to have
80 million active members in their annual report, actually 98 million
as of the March 2002 press release. They appear to strenuously resist
indicating the number of GeoCities users they have. Many more Yahoo
facts and figures are on their investor pages here:
http://docs.yahoo.com/info/investor/inv_info.html

This document on their investor website includes the phone numbers of
analysts that cover yahoo who may have more of an inside scoop on
their actual statistics, especially regarding pay vs free customers.

   http://docs.yahoo.com/info/investor/factsheet/3q01fs.pdf and
   http://docs.yahoo.com/info/investor/inv_analysts.html

[source: http://www.geek.com/news/geeknews/2002mar/gee20020311010675.htm
& http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1106-272854.html &
http://geocities.yahoo.com/ps/info/svc ]

At the time GeoCities was purchased in 1999 it had 3.5 million sites,
32 million pages of personalized content, and it attracted 19 million
users.

[source: http://www.onmagazine.com/on-mag/reviews/article/0,9985,19005-2861,00.html
]

More in depth analyst reports that will cost real money can be found
here:
     http://screen.yahoo.com/d?vw=0&db=reports&z=dat&tk=YHOO

I did a small, informal study using the Yahoo GeoCities search box. I
searched for the most commonplace words that I could think of, and
looked at the item count to see what they returned. Granted, you can
opt-out of the member directory, but it beats blind guessing. Some
results:

* "home" 21192 sites
* "index" 88160 sites
* "my" 95950 sites
* "my OR home OR page OR index OR hi" 255002 sites

So, there appears to be no completely specific information about
GeoCities stats, but since Yahoo is a publicly traded company, their
financial information is out there for anyone to delve through. I hope
this information is helpful to you. Thanks for writing us.

jessamyn-ga

Not everything I was hoping for, but I'm convinced it was everything
that's reasonably available, so great job. Thanks for the detail.
Saved me lots of time.