John Rezner
John Rezner is an entrepreneur best known for co-founding GeoCities in November 1994 alongside David Bohnett. Often regarded as the Internet's first cybercommunity, GeoCities allowed individuals to create personalized websites, fostering a sense of community among users. Rezner played a pivotal role in making the platform accessible, enabling even those with limited technical skills to share their interests and personal stories online. Under his leadership, GeoCities grew rapidly, attracting millions of monthly visitors and becoming the third most visited site on the Internet by the late 1990s.
Rezner's background includes a bachelor's degree in computer science from California State Polytechnic University and a master's from the University of Southern California. Before GeoCities, he spent nearly a decade at McDonnell Douglas, where he worked in technology and development. After GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999, Rezner departed the company, which later struggled to maintain its community-focused spirit under
Subject Terms
John Rezner
Cofounder of GeoCities
- Born: 1964
Primary Company/Organization: GeoCities
Introduction
John Rezner was in the right place at the right time in November 1994, when he and his partner, David Bohnett, cofounded GeoCities, which has been called the Internet's “first cybercommunity.” Rezner helped guide the company in its revolutionary efforts to give the public a voice in creating the Internet as it was becoming a part of the everyday lives of people around the world. He developed technology that made GeoCities so user-friendly that even those uninitiated in computer technology or web publishing could create their own sites. Despite a few missteps, such as mandating a floating GeoCities watermark for all member pages and attempting to target user interests for advertisers, Rezner demonstrated great foresight in understanding that many individuals wish to share information about themselves with others. He played a major role in cultivating the strong sense of community among GeoCities' neighborhoods that led the web-hosting service to become the third most often visited site on the Internet. Even though GeoCities was acquired by Yahoo! in 1999 and the company eventually closed, the site continues to hold a place in the history of the development of the Internet, having paved the way for the success of social networking sites of the early twenty-first century.
Early Life
John C. Rezner was born in California in 1964. Little is known about his personal life. He received a bachelor's degree in computer science from California State Polytechnic University in Pomona, California. He received his master's degree in computer science from the University of Southern California in 1992.
Rezner spent the early years of his professional life at the aerospace giant McDonnell Douglas, where he worked for nine years and held technology and development positions with various aerospace and defense programs, including the C-17, Mast Mounted Sight, ASW, and SDI. In 1986, he accepted a position as the head of information systems at AISF Group. He left AISF in 1995, after he and David Bohnett decided to create the web-hosting service that became GeoCities.
At GeoCities, Rezner and working for Bohnett eventually brought in Thomas R. Evans, the publisher of both the Atlantic Monthly and U.S. News and World Report, to serve as chief executive officer (CEO) of GeoCities. Evans had serious misgivings about the possibility of the Internet becoming successful; he thought web users would give up on the slow transmission speeds they were forced to endure at a time when access was mainly via dial-up connections. Regardless of his lack of enthusiasm, Evans applied his financial expertise to help the founders make the company a success.
Life's Work
In November 1994, entrepreneurs Rezner and Bohnett bought a computer for $5,000 that was capable of acting as a web server. They then became partners in creating Beverly Hills Internet, a web-hosting service that took full advantage of the burgeoning interest in the World Wide Web. The site allowed members to create their own websites, providing them with the opportunity to share whatever information they wished with the rest of the world. Some people simply shared their family photographs, recipes, poetry, or opinion pieces; others shared their love of collecting or information on their interests or hobbies. Other sites were devoted to specific celebrities, figures from history, or events. Each site was loosely categorized into “cities.”
Because dial-up modems were the main technology providing access to the Internet at this time, many users depended on Internet service providers (ISPs) that charged a set rate that increased if users went over their allotted plans. Uploading photographs and various other media could be a lengthy process, requiring dedication for any user interested in participating in the virtual neighborhoods of GeoCities. The quality of the pages varied greatly according to individual users' dedication and technological expertise.
Rezner and Bohnett designed GeoCities to serve as virtual cities named after their real-life counterparts, such as Silicon Valley (a gathering place for computer technology buffs) and Hollywood (a collection of sites devoted to the entertainment industry). Whenever a site began attracting a lot of visitors, site owners responded by making their sites more elaborate, a move that generated more traffic for GeoCities.
By the beginning of 1995, with Bohnett serving as CEO and Rezner taking on responsibilities as vice president of operations and chief technology officer, GeoCities was well on its way. Rezner oversaw design and development of new products. Rezner and Bohnett added the new virtual cities of Capital Hill, Paris, and Tokyo. By that time, the GeoCities was attracting more than 6 million visitors per month. As the service grew, GeoCities added new features: bulletin boards, mailing lists, and chat rooms. The sense of community deepened, and volunteers within each community helped to keep it going by serving as block captains, heading up welcome wagons, and monitoring chat rooms. Approximately fifteen hundred volunteers donated their time to keeping communities free of pornography.
On December 6, 1995, Rezner and Bohnett officially changed the name of the new company from Beverly Hills Internet to GeoCities. Within a year, the company had moved into well-appointed offices in Santa Monica, California, and established a second office on Park Avenue in New York City. GeoCities also began attracting new investors, including Yahoo! Within three years of its founding, the web-hosting service was one of the most frequently visited sites on the Internet.
Because the basic site was free, revenue was generated not from users but from items sold through the GeoStore, where customers spent GeoCities cash to purchase a range of products related to GeoCities. More revenue was derived from creating a subscription service that offered additional features and selling advertising spots on GeoCities. The company also negotiated deals with companies such as Amazon, earning commissions from sales that originated with GeoCities. By the fall of 1997, GeoCities was reporting that it had 1 million members, and revenue had climbed to $4.6 million. The following year, revenues exploded to between $20 and $25 million.
In June 1998, GeoCities prompted an uproar when it began requiring the so-called homesteaders on its site to display a translucent watermark identifying the site as located on GeoCities. Members objected on the basis that the watermark detracted from the design of their pages and argued that it was distracting to viewers. Some GeoCities homesteaders created new sites that were devoted solely to forcing GeoCities to remove the watermark. Rick Brown, whose Monty Python tribute site was one of the most popular on GeoCities, replaced his front page with one that was all black.
In the summer of 1998, Rezner and Bohnett took GeoCities public, with stocks rising from an initial public offering (IPO) of $17 per share to $100 per share at the height of GeoCities' popularity. Since Rezner owned 826,000 shares, the IPO swelled his worth to $103 million. With 3 million shares in the company, Bohnett earned greater profits from going public, netting some $367 million.
In 1999, new headquarters were established in Los Angeles when GeoCities was at its peak. By that time, it had become the third most visited site on the Internet, outranked only by America Online and Yahoo! GeoCities recorded 3.5 million unique visitors for the year. In January, Yahoo! purchased GeoCities for $4.6 billion. Rezner left the company at that time. According to most fans and many critics, the new owner set about destroying all that had been good about GeoCities communities. One of the first moves was to change addresses of individual websites to so-called vanity addresses, with members being forced to include their Yahoo! member names in their URLs.
With Yahoo! continuing to establish new guidelines for GeoCities websites, the homesteaders that had felt a sense of community under GeoCities complained that the camaraderie had gone. As a result, they abandoned GeoCities. Yahoo! launched a layoff of GeoCities employees, with the result that decisions dealing with site operations were made by Yahoo! employees who were not always familiar with the ways in which GeoCities had operated. Those GeoCities employees who remained insisted that both entrepreneurship and innovation were being sacrificed. Over time, however, dissatisfaction with the way Yahoo! was operating GeoCities was reflected in falling numbers, with 18.9 million visitors recorded in 2006. Visitors fell to only 11.5 million recorded in 2008.
Despite GeoCities' ongoing popularity, ten years after acquiring the web-hosting service from its founders, on October 26, 2009, Yahoo! closed the site down, shutting out more than thirty-eight thousand site owners in the United States. Canadian sites were also shut down. The initial enthusiasm expressed by Yahoo!'s president, Jeff Marlett, had long since declined, and outsiders insisted that GeoCities and Yahoo! simply had distinct cultures that had never successfully merged.
By 2012, GeoCities was operational only within Japan, where it continued to thrive from its Tokyo base. Other web-hosting websites continued to offer users a way of expressing themselves, including Tripod, Angelfire, Hotmail, Switchboard, and Xoom. Many users opted for social media sites instead, drifting to Friendster, Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace.
Personal Life
Rezner has served on the boards of companies that include the Dorado Corporation, Space4Rent.com, and Acecis. He lives in Manhattan Beach, California, with his wife; they have three children.
Bibliography
Borzykowski, Bryan. “The Ode.” Canadian Business 82.21 (2009): n. pag. Print.
Hansell, Saul. “GeoCities' Cyberworld Is Vibrant, but Can It Make Money?” New York Times 13 July 1998: n. pag. Print.
"How GeoCities Solved the Early Internet's Chicken-and-Egg Problem." Center, 21 Mar. 2023, blog.center.app/what-was-first-social-network/. Accessed 6 Mar. 2024.
Mandiberg, Michael, ed. The Social Media Reader. New York: New York UP, 2012. Print.
Swisher, Kara. “Tired of Tales about Quick Internet Riches? Try Sleeping on This: Those Who Tied Their Fortunes to GeoCities Yell Yahoo! All the Way to the Bank.” Wall Street Journal 29 Jan. 1999: n. pag. Print.