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60% of AOL's Profits Come From Misinformed Customers
satuon writes "Ken Auletta's big New Yorker piece on AOL (subscription only) this week revealed an interesting detail about the company's inner workings. According to Auletta, 80% of AOL's profits come from subscribers, and 75% of those subscribers are paying for something they don't actually need. According to Auletta: "The company still gets eighty percent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. 'The dirty little secret,' a former AOL executive says, 'is that seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.'"
A subscription that nobody needs? Oh, the irony.
I have karma to burn, kids. Moderate away. I will eat your modpoints for breakfast and come back for lunch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
He'll be okay.
Failure to follow this advice may result in non-deterministic behavior.
Alright! I knew "Apropos-of-nothing-Ubuntu-post" Guy wouldn't let me down!
AOL still makes profit.
Yeah! You tell whom!
Who are the other two? And particularly the person who actually NEEDS AOL?
There's plenty of reason people would intentionally subscribe to AOL
-Convinced that they are supporting America by paying to AOL
-Own stock in Time Warner and want to make sure stories like these aren't "100% of people subscribing to AOL are doing so on accident"
-Only buy newspapers 10 years too late and don't realize AOL isn't the current hottest thing
-Collected 2 tons of the free subscription discs and are still coasting off of free trials
-Like chatting online with other people who are equally dumb
-Perfected a keylogger that spreads through AOL 12 years ago, too lazy to make a new one
-One of the only online services that still supports windows 98, and why would I upgrade from windows 98?
-Doing it "ironically"
-Nostalgia
-Free subscription to Time or some other magazine/news service that for some reason is still associated with AOL
-Hipsters convinced it will eventually cycle back through to being the next big thing again, want to be able to say they were there before it was cool again
-Schizophrenia