AOL is now FREE

I used the aluminum AOL CD case to hold Cd's i've burnt, they hold at least 5 easy! great for storage.

 

AOL = you dont know any better ISP

 

think the only reason i'd ever rejoin aol again is for an aol email address but don't even know if i'd do that again... WAY too much spam.

 

I actually collected them for some reason over the years teh free hours they offered steadily increased from 10 free, to 25, to 30, to 50, to 90, I then started getting 30 days free, 45, 60, and the biggest one I ever got was a 90 day free trial. If I counted up all teh time I could have gotten trials I probably had a few years worth. What kills me even more about that CD campaign when they started advertising 3 month free trials I got one every month, lol.

AOL has been dieing for the last 4 years because people are moving on from dialup, and because they discovered that dialup with local toms internet access for $5/month works just as good as AOL's premium dialup for $25/month. and that they can still chat with all their friends with AIM, and can get a free email account with Yahoo or Hotmail. Aol had the larges tmarket share in many markets and instead of seizing control and taking advantage of it by making sure they stayed at the top they just relaxed and did nothing, management is terrible, if there is one thing worse then the AOL management its the AOL marketing team.

In my opinion this free services is gonna get a bunch of people to signup because its all cool to have AOL, and not pay for it, but 1-2 months later people will abandon it. The Broadband users like speed. Thats why they have BroadBand, they will notice fast that browsing web with FireFox or IE is faster then with AOL's browser. They will notice that their PC's are slowing down and they will drop AOL fast. This will not boose a lot of traffic on the site on teh long term only short term. If I need a map I go to google maps, if I need to read news I go to cnn.com AOL doesent offer me anything that I can't get somewhere else. In reality the only uique thing they have is a free email address. And people will realize its not worth all the pain of AOL to get and use it.

Another problem I see with this is a lot of hosts do not like free email accounts, and now with free email services some people will get them free. There are still million of dialup users whos primary and only email is their aol email and they will have to switch for their host. when they switch they will signup for a gmail, yahoo, or hotmail account while doing this they will first hand see how AOL mail is nothing special and in some ways doesent compete with the others, making some of its subscribers drop AOL altogether.

Overall this is to date one of the dumbest things they did, if I were in charge of AOL management, I'd parter with RoadRunner to bundle the software with the Cable internet customers. Afterall they are both owned by Time Warner. This way they retain exclusivity and offer software with a broadband conenction. I would also do some major investment in remaking the browser and other applications. FireFox and Opera are on a whole new level comapred to AOL. AOL is by far worse then IE, FF, or Opera, by making it less resource intensive and faster it would make people actually like the software and use it.

Another thing they can do is market their search engine, MSN recently had a large marketing campaing to increase their market share and I believe it was very successful. When people are looking for somethign they just don't think to go to AOL for searching. AOL uses Google results right now, it needs to have its own bots, and its own results, instead of selling its ads via Google they should sell directly. Launch an adwords type program for AOL. MSN is doing it and they are going to be successful after its a bit more developed.