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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."
That the September finally ended?
Why do the remaining 20 million stay? There is nothing on AOL that can't be accessed from the internet at half the cost.
12:50 - press return.
sending out those free coasters, they'd save some money and not have to fire staff.
Maybe they should stop focusing on "Making the internet better" and make it less cumbersome for their users. Each version is so much worse than the last. And why are they still using IE at the core when they own the development of the world's best browser???
Sound waves should be free!
What?!
Is the collective internet IQ average actually rising? People are realizing that paying $27 for a dialup account is a rip off?!
who r u gon make fun of on teh intarwebs nemore?? omgwtfbbq!!!11one
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
People would rather pay $50 and have broadband than close to $30 and have dial up. While you can use AOL over broadband, what's the point?
Reason, free market capitalism, and individualism
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...
Middle management's first and only answer to each new day in business: fire hundreds of people, preferably by entire departments.
Of course, AOL is still making over $400 million a month in subscriber revenue, but it's always better to have mass layoffs, as every middle manager knows. Fire 'em all. Layoffs by the hundreds. Destroyed careers. Destroyed credit. Savings lost. Years of effort flushed down a shitpipe. Who the fuck cares? The business must maintain their earnings and 20% annual growth.
Disney fired 4000 people between nine-figure summer movie releases, then destroyed an entire animation studio, firing 250 with unique abilities and experience. Walt Disney was very proud of the fact most of his employees had worked for Disney their entire careers. Now, the company can't wait to fire people every quarter. It's the way of business.
This isn't capitalism. It's budgeting by layoffs.
Careers are meaningless. Everyone is a temp. W-4 employment is a farce.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Here are some news: it seems that AOL is going to cut some jobs in europe (France) too.5 ,39181152,00.htm
http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/business/0,3902071
le souvenir d'une certaine image n'est que le regret d'un certain instant (M.Proust)
Netzero has been doing some very effective advertising for about a year. AOL did nothing, no changes in service, no advertising, no competitive rates, etc.
Now, AOL just started advertising, claiming value added services.
They're still going nowhere, at the end of the day the average consumer cares nothing about services, they want a cheaper price.
AOLs only alternative that I can see is to purchase netzero, but don't migrate their userbase. Continue to be netzero, and if you loose customers from AOL, BFD. You'll be getting less profit per customer, but at least you'll still the the recurring revenue.
Don't get me wrong, I'd love to see AOL crash and burn, but they _do_ have a niche.
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
For many AOL users AOL _is_ the internet. As more become educated they relealize they have been duped by clever marketing. When friends demonstrate broadband technolgies which, remarkably, access the "AOL" internet with freedom and speed they wake up.
They're all moving over to their local cable and telephone companies. Which have even lower security than AOL. Expect more worms, viruses, and general whackiness than when AOL was between them and the Wild Wild Net
Best Slashdot Co
Compared to past years, my MTA logs for my company have shown a HUGE decline in inbound chain letters, and nested FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of FWDs of ...
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Many AOL "customers" aren't actually customers at all, but rather, people who think AOL=Internet, MS-Word and Windows are the same thing, and that their monitor is 'the computer' while the computer case is 'the hard drive'. AOL isn't losing actual customers, they're losing people who washed up there because they clicked on something when they booted their BestBuy PC for the first time. These people are simply moving to Broadband, or any one of the $6/month ISPs, or DSL, or something else.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
(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.
For me, the best ISP is the one I notice the least. Basically, I want a reliable pipe to the internet, for as little cost as possible. Nothing more and nothing less.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I wonder if Time-Warner is starting to regret it.
Ignorance kills, complacency kills, hatred kills, but usually not the ones guilty of them.
Yes thats all I want too, but AOL isnt aimed at the /. crowd. As someone said before, AOL is aimed at Joe and Jane Sixpack, who are too afraid of what lurks on the wire or to clueless too know any better. And frankly, thoes kinds of users need something like AOL to help them take their baby steps onto the web.
Please let them fire the person who keeps sending me those $%*# disks.
Read any good sonnets lately?
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.
eTrade SUCKS
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.
[]'s Victor Bogado da Silva Lins
^[:wq
The first circle was Compuserve. There were a lot of fairly clueful people on Compuserve who just hadn't discovered flat-rate PPP hosting.
The second circle was AOL. Compuserve users tended to view AOL as a cartoon environment and AOL users as idiots. The more clueful AOL users occasionally moved to Compuserve but only rarely from AOL to PPP dialup hosting.
The bottom circle of Network Hell, from which there was no redemption, was Prodigy. Prodigy was like the short bus for AOL. If you couldn't handle AOL's cartoony complexity, you could go to Prodigy and quietly play with play-doh with the other Prodigy users. They say Prodigy went out of business, but I believe the service and their users were quietly ejected into another dimesion, where they remain TO THIS VERY DAY! No one's going to organize a search party though.
These days AOL's mostly just another Internet provider, though it sounds like they also still have some internal services they offer. CompuServe's still around but I believe they have all of about 3 subscribers left. And of course Prodigy's off in the dimension of cluelessness. It's really not to surprising that some AOL users are trying to escape, and I guess the new marketing campaign is an attempt to scare up some more newbies. AOL provides the Internet an invaluable service (Keeping most AOLers out of our hair over here on the seedy west side of the net) so I hope they manage to stay successful.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
AOL and similar services (Compuserve) were built around a model of access designed to take advantage of a new, emerging technology; ie dial-up internet for us ordinary folk. In the early 90's, they were the cutting edge; they made it easy for the ordinary person to get online, plain and simple. How could this not be popular? And it was.
Broadband and other providers are now beginning to eat at AOL's US marketshare (lack of new subscribers figures prominently), and for some reason, people (perhaps including the Time-Warner/AOL people) are surprised.
Where is AOL strong? The USA and the UK. Both have similar (in a broad sense) market realities; in the US it's the slow rollout of broadband due to structural reasons while in the UK it's the network's structure itself (expensive phone charges, often including tolls for local calls, and monopoly providers of broadband, who coincidentally have a financial interest in keeping you on dialup).
Now, Compuserve and AOL were big competitors in Canada at the beginning; then AOL bought Compuserve and quit offering it to new customers, although technically it still exists, sort of. Roll the clock back to 1995.
For a mature product category, it's a standard marketing given that a firm can expect to get business in Canada roughly equal to 10% of it's US business. At first, it looked like that with AOL/Compuserve in the US and Canada.
Then came broadband, and lots of competition. Storefront providers began showing up in my town around then, to the point where I could get access from dozens of dialup ISPs, some of which had as little as a few hundred customers. The local University offered it's network access at home for 10 bucks a month to employees and students.
As well, Cable and telephone companies began to get in (they lagged the mom-and-pop providers, getting serious towards the end of the decade). The local teleco had already rebuilt province-wide with fibre optic cable, completing it's network in the early 80's.
I had AOL for about 3 months in 1995 (you know, free with the computer). Then, I switched to broadband (CableModem) when it was introduced in my city. February 1996. A few months later DSL was offered (my local teleco was the first full-scale launch in N America, if you lived in the 2 largest cities 80% of the residential area had it available at launch). See "structural reasons", above.
Now, I don't live in some techno-heaven; I live in a city of less than 200K in a rural area; draw a circle 100 miles in radius around city hall and you get 260K, not 500. But, no regularory/right-of-way issues. Rollout is quick. Today (2004), if you live within 10 miles of a town of 800 people or more, anywhere in the province, you can get DSL.
Virtually all Canadian internet users came on after the introduction of broadband, not before. These customers don't know anything about AOL, and signed up with the broadband provider itself.
So, around 1998, after being firstest on the block, AOL was around number 8 in Canada (subscriber numbers). By 2000 they don't even register in the top 20. AOL/Compuserve never got past 1 million subscribers and have some fraction of that now.
We know AOL is quite familiar with this history; a lot of it is their history. So, here are the questions they should have asked themselves:
Why didn't we get our 10%? We should have had around 3 million in Canada. Never even got to 1/3 of that.
What can we do to combat broadband? Content? Pricing? Added Value? What? What is it our competition offers that's so attractive and how can we offer something that competes?
Since we had this little micro-model showing us the future, what did we do to use this info to combat market forces in the US, where we still have a leg to stand on?
What do you mean, "we did nothing"?
Personally, I think I would have switched to some variation of the @home model and made my service integral with a broadband provider. AOL would still be getting checks and new subscribers. Now that @home has failed and providers know how easy it is to do it themselves, even this model is now doomed.