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Has AOL Lost Its Sex Drive?
TheViewFromTheGround writes "Why have the years since the merger with Time Warner been so hard on America Online? Michael Wolff, a consultant who advised Time Warner not to buy AOL in the early 90's, says that the the big problem is Time Warner's denial of AOL's core value: a monopoly on dirty chat. The argument says that AOL was successful because they had a critical mass of people and that it skillfully marketed talking dirty by appearing to be family friendly. Now, the old media bedfellow is pushing AOL to stop its pimping ways."
and they're what makes people leave AOL in droves.
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
Time Warner's cable interests carry as much softcore porn as the next guy and that don't seem to bother them none.
AOL's problems are market saturation pure and simple. No ISP can grow like AOL and others did in the late 90s and early 00s for ever.
is that in their rush to embrace the Internet they made themselves obsolete. Throughout the early 90's AOL really did provide a lot of value add and made online communities and chatting accessible to the average computer user. By the mid 90's people were still using AOL because it was a safe way to ease into that "WWW thing" everyone was now talking about but still have acess to all that AOL content. Flash forward to the very late 90's and now and AOL has stopped producing anywhere near the amount of content that they used to. All the old cool things like AOL's gaming content just pushes you right back onto the internet. AOL in striving so hard to make sure people could access the internet through them has ceased to have any value beyond that of your basic ISP. All roads from AOL lead out to the internet and eventually most users ask themselves why bother with AOL and its bloated crappy software at all? AOL's user base has "grown up" and the user base which they pull from (newbies) are going to be in shorter and shorter supply as time goes on. Couple that with missing out on being bundled with XP and you see that AOL just don't have that great a future.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The article has an interesting point of view, however I think AOL is failing due to stagnation. The article touches on this a little, AOL hasn't innovated in years. Seriously, no matter how lame AOL is in reality, they did make some great innovations in instant chat. All the new AOL releases over the past 2+ years haven't added much besides a new revision number.
...the Time Warner people, who know a thing or two about advertising, correctly surmised that advertising was not going to support the Internet. And so the plan was to sell users Time Warner content. (In my personal defense, I kept talking about what a dirty place AOL was -- that the Internet was the porn business. But the feeling seemed to be that, first, I was joking and, second, while new entertainment technologies often started dirty, they soon became much more sanitized and mass-market.) This service, which started in the autumn of 1994 and closed in the spring of 1999, was called Pathfinder and proved two things: Selling Time Warner content on the Internet was pretty much a nonstarter, and the people at Time Warner lacked a certain flair for the Internet. We just don't get it, they said. Which was the essential reason for merging with AOL. [Emphasis mine.]
I'm not sure that Mike's getting it any more than TW. Does anyone with any sense imagine that *this internet thing* is going to fall apart if someone can't figure out how to make money on it with standard advertainment/publimation models? Even in '94. And dirty chat is a killer app?
illegitimii non ingravare