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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.'"
Please, slashdotters, don't respond to this obvious troll. Thank you for your support.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
True, I just can't get my head around the concept of this social bullshit.
People talk about 'blogs' as if they were something new, come on! it's a personal webpage with a CMS on it, that's all. Remember when the word blog appeared in the scene? /.ers hated it. We complained, and we made fun of people using it. Then we accepted it, and now most /.ers say blog without a blink.
facebutt? we used to make fun of myspace and all that crap ... now most of /. uses facebutt. We also laughed at twitter when it first came up online, but now we report based on the stupid crap people post on it.
Personally, I have fixed this situation, with a few gmail filters, a brain-filter to ignore people talking about it, and this:
almafuerte@almafuerte-laptop:~$ cat /etc/hosts ::1 almafuerte-laptop localhost6.localdomain6 localhost6 ::1 localhost ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
192.168.0.101 almafuerte-laptop
127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
127.0.1.1 almafuerte-laptop
127.0.0.1 hotmail.com
127.0.0.1 facebook.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 twitter.com
127.0.0.1 live.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts
almafuerte@almafuerte-laptop:~$
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?