AOL Gasping and Grasping

AOL continues to lose massive acreage of its online real estate which has the company gasping with fear and grasping at new ideas.

In an attempt to keep current users, lure in new clients, and regain advertising revenues, AOL will be launching free video and music content.

The allure of members only areas is not keeping once-loyal users on the site, while it continues to alienate not only non-users, but also search engines, and hence, the attractiveness to advertisers.

Three years ago, AOL enjoyed a healthy 26.7 million subscribers, but has steadily declined, losing 5 million users. Ironically, the company had a 3 percent revenue decline earlier this year, but gained 45 percent in advertising revenues. Telecommunication cost mitigation has allowed the company to still enjoy a 10 percent profit despite the loss in subscribers and revenues.

Further proof of the grasping, comes with AOL's olive branch to deserting subscribers, abandoned email accounts, and AIM users. The company is now offering free web based email accounts to all AIM users and forwarding of emails from abandoned accounts to AIM.

Some users just seem resistant to change. Many analysts are speculating that many of their current paid subscribers stay with the company solely for their email accounts. Jim Bankoff, AOL executive vice president of Product and Programming, flatly denies the claim.

AOL has endured the test of time, but only time will tell if they can prevail and preserve.

 

Well, I can tell you one reason why they will not survive the test of time. Because they don't give a rats ass about their customers and they are too greedy and abuse them with shady billing practices.

Those rats charged me 280.00 dollars for 8 months of usage even though I never used one minute of online time and never logged in to my account.

I hope they sink like the titatic and hope their competition crushes them.

Those famous words are still ever so true... "AOL SUCKS".

 

I'm not an AOL fan either, not for personal reasons like you, but simply because I don't like their product and their like a dealer getting folks hooked and afraid to use something else. Sorry you had a bad experience!