AOL Subscribers Finding Greener Pastures

Mitch writes "The Register is reporting that America Online has lost close to 2 million customers since September 2003. At the end of September they had 22.7 million customers in the US which was down more than 500,000 since the beginning of the quarter. This news comes one day after it was announced that more than 700 jobs would be cut from Virginia offices by the end of this year."

Comments

And the burning questions remain

[kalpol]

Why do the remaining 20 million stay? There is nothing on AOL that can't be accessed from the internet at half the cost.

Re:And the burning questions remain

[nospmiS remoH]

I pay $26.95 for a 3Mbit down / 256 Kbit up over cable. I remember in the early 90's when I was first exposed to a locak dialup and I literally said outloud, "Well then, why does anyone need AOL anymore?" I thought AOL's days were numberd but I never knew that number was in the thousands.

Life lesson => Never underestimate the ignorance of pretty much everyone.

Re:And the burning questions remain

[luvbassonacid]

well i used to use aol many, many, moons ago when i dident really know any better. sooner or later when i started seeing pop-up ads appear *before* windows explorer had shown me my icons is when i really went gung-ho from a typical aol'er point of veiw.. i'd have to say that i am much, much, more on top of the tech/geek issues then i was before, but at a cost that no typical aol'er can stand.

for instance the cost of letting go (i.e. wasting time learning new standards) is enough to keep aol'ers there. my girlfreind is a very smart intelligent person, decent at coding html, good with computers, cars, you name it.. but for the life of me i will never ever ever get her to not use aol (we have actually gotten into arguments because she felt my insistance that she use firefox was disrespectful to her personal wants) even after years of plublicity of the perils of windows security, my girlfreind still refuses to deal with learning to use a decent firewall/spyware killer/cache cleaner as well. with most people, i assume, they would rather spend the money on aol and norton then spend the time to learn how to configure a router, forward some ports, set up some firewall rules, manage their admin logs, yadda yadda yadda. its very simply to understand why this is so , i assume, the time it would take to do everything i needed to do become adept to the situation is worth more to people then the $24.95 a month for aol and $69.95 a year for norton internet security. its 101 economics.

so on the bigger issue of why 20 million people still use aol, i feel its a combination of

1) people who just dont know any better (like me in times past)
2) people who just dont care (like my girlfreind now)
3) people who know and dont care enough because their $369.35 a year is worth less then the oppertunity cost incured while reading "A+ for dummies"
4) and people who just cant get detached from their aol email address (i dont have aol installed on my comp but i do check my @aol.com every now and then even though i use gmail primarily)

Re:And the burning questions remain

[Anonymous Coward]

I believe you are aboslutely right. I have had an AOL account since 1997 and I got my parents on it. Now I am using some other ISP (broadband)however the net is not safe when out of the AOL safetynet.. Within the first hour connection to the net via cable I have had 15 attacks!! So I configured my firewall quickly. But how about my parents? Too old for that..how about my little brothers and sis? Too young to really know how to protect themselves. And I am not talking about spywares and viruses..

I do not want anymore to do Technical support I spent too much time already cleaning their PCs..

Also another way to look at it is when you have AOL in France (I am french) you could go online for a really good deal, they were the first to pay for the telephone (lobby of france telecom tried to block this cause they wanted us to pay a lot for telephone) anyway, long story short it was the first ISP that allow you to surf without counting the minutes..they also developped a toll free number part of a basic modem plan, cause in france cable is only in big cities and wifi only in some parisian train stations, so when you need to go online with your laptop, in teh middle of nowhere it's a cool thing.

Yes it has a lot of flows such as using 125m RAM of your CPU... Windows do the same so you really need a lot of RAM. And it kind of impose you a lot of stuff, so it's keep on bugging people who are no newcomers..

But they had opened their system to IMAP and you could now use it with outlook :)
And if you have broadband you do not have to open the entire systeme (it saves you the 125m RAM)

AOL has CUSTOMERS SERVICE...real people talking..

AOL IS NOT FOR NERDS OR FOR TECHIES, but really for ordinary guys and MOSTLY for your kids and parents.

watch the commercials

[mshultz]

You seen those AOL commercials that began to show up a few weeks ago (during the baseball playoffs and world series)?

I never understood why AOL thought it would be a good idea to show a roaring mob of millions of customers outside company headquarters with ideas for "how to improve the Internet." I guess these ads show a pretty accurate picture of their recent status, with that many customers leaving...

Re:Lite Client

[Jim Hall]

Maybe they should stop focusing on "Making the internet better" and make it less cumbersome for their users.

Their last round of commercials doesn't help that image. My personal favorite is the one that implies all the AOL users hate the service. You know the one - long line of AOL users, asking to see the president because they have an idea on "making the internet better". And the line becomes a huge crowd of people outside.

A non-technical friend of mine saw that commercial, and his immediate impression was "Wow, AOL must _really_ suck if everyone hates it that much." That certainly seems to be the message they're sending with that ad.

AOL demographics

[Andy_G_Bannister]

Does anybody know of any studies on the demographics of AOL customers? My hunch, from those I know who use it, togeher with AOL advertising (I'm in the UK), would be that it tends to be:

(a) Net newbies who then keep renewing their service
(b) Older folks who like a bit of hand-holding

This is not meant to be derogatory --- I'm simply curious as to who these millions are and why they stick with a service that is slow, cumbersome and expensive.

Re:AOL demographics

[Lifewish]

My mum's experience is probably reasonably representative. She's pretty tech-savvy generally, but she found AOL very reliable, stable and easy to use. For some reason, she didn't think the fact that it conflicted with Ethereal was a big enough problem to merit a switch...

She recently moved away because she wanted to set up a domain name/webhosting thingy via a third party and AOL was being annoying about outgoing mail servers.

Since then, she's had major problems with email (mails coming in many hours after they were sent, apparently completely at random). BT (the new ISP at the time) have mucked her about quite a bit. She's finally got broadband and the problems are (apparently) gone, but it can't have been a fun experience.

Those members of society who don't use the more complex features of the 'net are unlikely to ever have a major problem with AOL. This cannot be said about most other ISPs.

mistake?

[theblacksun]

I wonder if Time-Warner is starting to regret it.

Re:Yes of course

[Anonymous Coward]

Company executives only care about hte current quarter stock price and management only cares about getting promoted by any means necessary including "saving money" by firing workers and pushing out half ass projects as "completed".

There's managers out there who fuck up a project and get promoted saying it's done .. Then the next project owner is left holding the bag while the shit hits the fan ... after which the previous manager goes "oh it failed ... hmm.. well that never happened under me!"

Re:Define "customer"

[pixelpusher220]

Add this to the equation...I've got an AOL acct I've had for probably 10-12+ years. I don't actualy use it much anymore save for the screenname for AIM and chatting. Now that I've gotten around to cancel it, guess what...I'll lose my AIM name if I cancel the service.

I *know* this used to be allowed but AOL stopped it to prevent the bleeding of even more people who now only want the free AIM service.

Since I use that name for damn near everything, work/family/friends, it's really too much hassle to switch it to another name at this point so I'm down to the 4.95/month option that keeps the email and chat active but no realy other features (a good thing).

Any thoughts as to the anti-trust aspects of this? They offer a free service, I want to downgrade to that free service but I'm told that because I started with AOL instead of AIM (which didn't exist back then) I can't just have an AIM account now (with the same name). If I had started with AIM, then signed on to AOL, and then wanted to go back to AIM they *say* I'd be able too. Anyone here done that?

Bad Strategies

[Jesus IS the Devil]

Someone at Aol should read up on some of Clayton Christiansen's (sp?) books regarding disruptive technologies. It appears they've said good riddance to their lower profit customers, all the while ignoring the power users:

- Those who want control of their internet. Those that don't want to be blocked (by feature and by port) from using third-party mail programs such as Outlook.

- Those low-profit customers who want broadband. Yes we know 56K yields a much higher profit margin, but by doing that, they've missed the damn boat! It's an eventuality that everyone will want to use broadband. Who wants to be stuck with an overpriced 56k connection?

- The internet and everything it stands for screams "OPEN". There was a time when Aol was perfect. It provided information and things to do when the internet was barren. No longer. Even MSN has embraced the open internet by porting many of their features to public websites. Yet Aol is still keeping everything closed for members only.

- Bad strategy. The whole point of Aol doing all of the above is to inflict pain on those who want to leave. In business, pain always work better than vitamins. I know because back in '96 I had an Aol dialup account. It was a bitch to dump it and lose my email address, AIM account, community forums, chat rooms, etc. However, I needed to use Outlook. I saw all those things that were exclusive to Aol becoming widely available for free on the internet. At almost $24/month, it became unbearable after a while, and I dumped it. Never looking back again.

I have to say, Aol is the one company that, when someone leaves, they will almost never re-join. That tells you something is seriously wrong with their business plan.

Re:Yes of course (somewhat off-topic)

[bogado]

Disney is lost, the only movies that are realy good from "them" are actualy from pixar. After "the incredibles" pixar is not legaly bound to disney (they had a contract of 5 movies, that turned into 6 since disney insisted that toy story 2 was a sequel and did not count as a movie).

They now are thinking that 3D is the reason pixar is a success, forgeting that those movies are good for their characters, scripts and animation skills. If disney keep doing movies like the last ones they produced, they will sink even deeper.

Re:Does this mean?

[Anonymous Custard]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_September

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Eternal September (also September that never ended or endless September) are Usenet slang expressions for the period of time beginning September 1993. The use of these expressions implies the belief that standards of discourse and behavior on Usenet have declined since 1993 due to an unending influx of new users.

Usenet originated among universities. Every year, in September, a large number of new university students got access to Usenet, and took some time to acclimate themselves to the network's standards of conduct and netiquette. September, thus, represented the network's largest regular influx of newbies. After a month or so, the new users would (it is supposed) learn to comport themselves as normal Usenet users.

In 1993, the online service America Online began offering Usenet access to its tens of thousands (now millions) of users. To many old-timers, these "AOLers" were far less prepared to learn netiquette than university freshmen, and their sheer numbers dwarfed the ability of the network's culture to assimilate new users.

Since that time, the dramatic rise in the popularity of the Internet has led to a constant stream of new users -- in some people's view, drowning out the old Usenet community. Thus, from the point of view of the pre-1993 Usenet user, the regular "September" newbie influx never ended.

Software programs exist which display the date in accordance with this reckoning -- for instance, September 3840, 1993 for the date March 6, 2004.

The gag is at times extended -- for instance, the notional future date at which Usenet discourse will become sensible, mature, and educated has been called "October 1, 1993".