Other Questions

un**OFFICIAL MESSAGE FROM GEOCITIES ABOUT CHILDREN'S PAGES**

 As you all know by now, we here at GeoCities have now required that children 13 and under either buy a GeoPlus account or have their parent register the page in their name. There are several reasons for this which I would like to explain from our point of view:

1. You children in the 13 and under demographic just don't bring in any advertising dollars. Frankly we can't market to Hasbro for pop-up ads, therefore, you are dead weight.

2. By getting your parents to pay for your site, we can at least break even on your site and then sell the credit card information to telemarketers so your parents can be interuppted while trying to supervise you writing your web pages.

3. If we get your parents to put their name on the account, we can fool our advertisers into thinking there are even more adults in that all important 25-34 age demographic who have subscribed to our over 2.9 million (Whoops, 1.3 million, teehee) homesteaders.

4. The internet is a business. It's high time you pre-teens jumped out of that innocent fog and learned life is tough. We make the rules and will have sold out long before you reach voting age, learn how to make the internet run the way of the corporate raiding you will read about in your textbooks. (Books mind you, not on the internet, we can have you read about things, but not interact with them.)

5. Did you really think we were going to let you experiment and learn for free? You will learn better when you grow up. Trust me, you will appreciate it more if your parents have to pay for it. And if they refuse, well, the world needs a computer illetrate poverty class too.

That's all for now, run tell Mommy and Daddy to head on in with their Credit Cards and marketing, (Whoops!), I mean confidential, personal information.

Signed,

Your loving home on the Web (Now collecting rent from minors) 

• Hilarious, but not quite right. Here's the official policy: by T------ - Senior Community Manager, 3/18/98