Understanding AOL’s loss of subscribers
Understanding AOL’s loss of subscribers
AOL lost over 800,000 paying subscribers in the 4th quarter of last year, according to a report in today’s Washington Post. AOL is a training wheels version of the Internet, and Jupiter Research reported late last year that over half of Internet users now have at least 2 years experience online. That alone meant trouble for AOL, but it doesn’t entirely explain the continued drain on paid subscribers. What’s really at issue here is that AOL is all about command and control, and the Internet, at core, is opposed to such. Its business model is flawed, and it will never be what its originators prophesied. I, for one, hope we’ll see an end to those ubiquitous AOL CDs at every checkout and in the mail. They don’t even make good coasters.
This entry was posted on Thursday, January 29th, 2004 at 10:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
February 2nd, 2004 at 1:10 pm
Plus its hard to use! Not for me (of course), but my 80 year old mother never figured it out. So I ditched AOL and just got her set up with an ISP and Yahoo as the home page, and she can cope with that.
Now if my mother finds yahoo easier than AOL, and my mother is very untechnical, then AOL is sunk!