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About 1.5 Million People Still Pay for AOL (cnbc.com) 81

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Amid the hodgepodge of Verizon Media assets that Apollo Global Management is buying from Verizon -- Yahoo Finance, TechCrunch, advertising technology, Yahoo Fantasy -- there's one cash flow stream that will not die: AOL. From a report: The famed internet company that once bought Time Warner for $182 billion and used to make billions of dollars annually selling dial-up modem access, still has a monthly subscription service called AOL Advantage. In 2015, 2.1 million people were still using AOL's dial-up service. That revenue stream has dried up. The number of dial-up users is now "in the low thousands," according to a person familiar with the matter.

But AOL still has a fairly lucrative base of customers who pay for technical support and identity theft services each month. There are about 1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage, said another person, who asked not to be named because the information is private. If average revenue per user is $10 per month, conservatively, that's $180 million of annual revenue.
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About 1.5 Million People Still Pay for AOL More

About 1.5 Million People Still Pay for AOL

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  • unsubscribe (Score:5, Insightful)

    by MrLogic17 ( 233498 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @08:33PM (#61344490) Journal

    I wonder how many of those are people who don't know they are still paying, or people who can't figure out how to cancel?

    • The tech support service sounds ambiguous, while the identity theft service sounds like some you'd normally only find on the dark web.

    • Re:unsubscribe (Score:5, Funny)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:19PM (#61344630)

      I wonder how many of those are people who don't know they are still paying, or people who can't figure out how to cancel?

      Or they think the Internet stops working if they cancel AOL.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by backslashdot ( 95548 )

      Probably many. Visa has a system by which some companies automatically get the updated credit card number even after it has been expired and re-issued.

    • Re:unsubscribe (Score:5, Insightful)

      by CastrTroy ( 595695 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @07:40AM (#61345858)

      Maybe they just don't want to go through the hassle of changing their email address. I know a lot of people who use their ISP as their email provider, and it makes it hard to switch ISPs, otherwise it's a huge hassle to switch over all your accounts to use your new email address.

      • Yeah, this I suspect is the case for a lot of those customers.

        Was trying to buy a house this year and the real estate attorney my wife picked does all of her digital correspondence from an @AOL.com email address. She set it up back at the dawn of the internet, and it hasn't stopped working, so she keeps using it. The longer you use a certain email address, the more people have it, and the harder it is to give it up. Particularly if you use it heavily for your business.

        It is not unlike the situation with

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I worked as a temp in a bank trust department in 1994 and paid the bills for a number of our elderly customers. There were people who were still paying $1.50/month for touch tone phone service, which had been free since around 1978, and several were still paying rent on rotary phones that had broken and been sent back to ATT (or maybe Michigan Bell) in the early 1970s. Apparently no one in the trust department had ever bothered to look at their customers' bills, one lady was paying for four subscriptions

    • "I wonder how many of those are people who don't know they are still paying, or people who can't figure out how to cancel?"

      They are all long dead.

  • Email address maybe? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by evanh ( 627108 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @08:42PM (#61344514)

    I'd pay some of that just to keep an existing email address that isn't a tracking whore.

    • Re: Email address maybe? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by klipclop ( 6724090 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @08:45PM (#61344524)
      In that case, ProtonMail is your friend

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by evanh ( 627108 )

        That's not pre-existing is it.

      • Or perhaps FastMail [fastmail.com]

        Same deal, but hosted in USA.

        • Re: Email address maybe? (Score:4)

          by jwhyche ( 6192 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @09:27AM (#61346184) Homepage

          Same deal, but hosted in USA.

          Yeah, but no. There is a reason to keep your email over seas if you have need too. It's the same reason to keep your large amounts of money in an over seas bank account. To make it difficult for 3rd parties to access it.

          Example here is if the RIAA thinks you are trading music through email and wants to sue your ass. With a US based email like Fastmail all they got to do is convince a judge, he issues a subpoena, and then all your correspondences to your furry yiffing friends are public knowledge.

          Keeping it overseas makes just one more hoop for them to jump through. A US subpoena is worthless so they got to get one in the country where the email is hosted. If they can at all.

          The key is not to be low hanging fruit. Which has been the motto of the RIAA/MPAA over the last 20 years. Every case they have prosecuted has been low hanging fruit.

          This of course doesn't apply to the government. If they want to read your email, they will.

          • I dont disagree, but I do think if you lived outside the US keeping email there would be fine, and maybe better then keeping it in your home country. I think the key is to keep things outside of where you live.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by jwhyche ( 6192 )

              Yes, exactly. My apologies. Sometimes I also suffer from the "USA is the center of the universe" syndrome.

              But yes, that is the whole point of what I was trying to say. Keep your sensitive data, and money, outside the jurisdiction of the country that you live it. It adds another level of legal protection and hurdles for people that want it to jump through. Not to be low hanging fruit.

    • I suspect that's going to be the reason for most of them, and they just threw in "identity theft protection" so people feel like they are getting something, anything, besides just an email address.

      Apart from the few dial-up users, email is the single thing I can think of AOL providing that even remotely still has a value.

    • Re:Email address maybe? (Score:5, Funny)

      by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Tuesday May 04, 2021 @07:52AM (#61345902)

      If you're still paying for AOL it's a safe bet what your web searches are about. Metamucil, hearing aids, Ben Gay, and posting to slashdot.

    • Isn't AOL email free though?

    • $10/month seems steep for an email address. Maybe $3/month, or $15/year or something along those lines.

      A nice short domain name is desirable though. @aol.com is fairly short, although I'd love something really short like @x.org. Perhaps Quantum Fiber should start a side business of email addresses with their @q.com domain.

  • I donâ(TM)t know how many CDs I discarded. I did use one.

  • WOW! (Score:5, Funny)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:29PM (#61344678) Journal

    This reminds me, I should probably think about canceling that Compuserve subscription.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by shanen ( 462549 )

      Did you know GE tried to create a competitor to CompuServe? I was actually one of the early contractors, but I got into a little spat with Bill Louden, who had been recruited from Compuserve...

      • Re:WOW! (Score:5, Informative)

        by Yeechang Lee ( 3429 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @11:14PM (#61344932)

        GE did create a competitor. GEnie [wikipedia.org] existed for years, quite successfully.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          Please define "quite successfully". With a 4-digit UID, you might well have been a customer...

          But GEnie did have a pretty good space game, something like DECWAR. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] Can't recall the name of the GEnie game, though I've just remembered a tactic that was used by certain cheaters...

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by skipkent ( 1510 )

            The MUD GemStone also debuted on GEnie, and it's still around, but has been dying slowly over the years.

      • I was more of Delphi (News corp) user. The demise of Delphi coincided with the arrival of Bill Louden. That guy had his fingers in all the early services it seems.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by shanen ( 462549 )

          So that must be where he went after GEnie? What year was that? I don't remember how long GEnie lasted after I left, but I think he would have had to leave before it died to have had enough credibility to get a CxO position at Delphi. That one used to be pretty big in its day.

          Hmm... To (perhaps rudely) answer my own questions, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] says that it was 1996 and that it still exists, at least in the discussion forums part, which is what he'd worked on back at CompuServe. (Also the par

    • I keep calling the old BBS I subscribed to to cancel the service, but all I ever get is a bunch of screeching noises.

  • C-level officer who signed up for it decades ago (Score:5, Interesting)

    by schwit1 ( 797399 ) on Monday May 03, 2021 @09:34PM (#61344694)

    And nobody in accounting has the courage to ask him if the monthly recurring subscription on the company AMEX is still needed.

  • Actually, it was an Ask Slashdot question that is unlikely to be used. Also, it was focused on the Yahoo side, so it would have to be changed from "What would motivate you to Yahoo?" to "What would motivate you AOL?" (In the form of an old editor command, it would be s/Yahoo/AOL/g (or something).) To wit:

    Notice that I tried hard to avoid loading the question with any presuppositions or assumptions. Yeah, I know the latest write-down was gigantic, but even a "measly" $5 billion is more than you'll find in my couch cushions. (If only I owned a couch, and with a nod to the old joke "Couch Potatoes of the World, Unite! You have nothing to lose but your free time.")

    So is there anything the new owners could do with Yahoo that would make it interesting to you? I confess there was a time when I liked the brand (but I regard the AOL brand as having no detectable salvage value). And yes, I know that the story was recently mentioned on Slashdot and was barely noticed. A negative form of the question could be "Why do so few people care about Yahoo now?"

    My own "solution approach" is that the new owners could try jujitsu with the personal information. Show our personal data to us! Let us know what they know about us! Help us understand the flows of our personal data. Let us correct the parts that are wrong. What parts are based on information that we knew was out there and what parts are derived from sources we weren't even aware of? Most importantly, tell us what our own personal information really means!

    However, if you're paying attention (or peeking ahead), you may have realized that there's a Catch-22 there. What my personal data means largely depends on its relationships to the personal data of other people, and they cannot easily share that level of information. For example, if they tried to base it on the Golden Rule, how could they possibly mediate the massive negotiations? There would be million of people saying "I'll help you understand your personal information if (and only to the degree that) you help me understand mine."

    On the economic side, I do see an obvious sales pitch: Share the profits with me. I still wouldn't be happy about it, but I'd feel some degree of consolation if THEIR corporate profits based on MY personal information were shared between the two sides. Unfortunately, to do that in an equitable way would require REAL competition, and that's the LAST thing any of the corporate cancers actually want, even including the extremely diminished cancers like Yahoo and AOL. (And yeah, the implication of real competition in using personal information is that I should be able to gather up my personal information and move it where I can get a better deal, but that's even LASTER than last on their list.)

    Finally, a brief consideration of what went wrong with Yahoo and AOL. It's not like "They had only one job and blew it." They always had a bunch of tasks and projects in progress. The problem was in their priorities. Or, to torture the old joke, "They had a #1 job and blew it." I'd wager the highly paid CxOs never figured out what the #1 job was for more than two hours at a time (but that may be projection based on my own Internet bubble experiences with managers without priorities).

    The first internal reference to AOL is fine with being ignored, but the second one calls for s/AOL and AOL/AOL and Yahoo/ after the first edit command.

  • Ignorance is often an expensive luxury.
  • My parents had to cancel their credit card and get the State attorney general involved to cancel their subscription around 2000.

  • alt.aol-sucks?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I remember we started referring to it as "Eh? Oh, hell" when the marketing exec "upgraded" the AOL version on his work laptop and we had to reload the OS for the third time in five months. Of course he blamed the issues on Microsoft . . .

  • 1.5 million people pay for data security support plans that for some reason are still AOL branded. A couple of thousand people are still paying for AOL *dial up* services, which is what everyone thought of when they saw the headline.

    • i A couple of thousand people are still paying for AOL *dial up* services, which is what everyone thought of when they saw the headline.

      Because of the slow dial-up download speeds, they're still waiting for the rest of the article to load.

      • A couple of thousand people are still paying for AOL *dial up* services, which is what everyone thought of when they saw the headline.

        Because of the slow dial-up download speeds, they're still waiting for the rest of the article to load.

        No, they are waiting for the rest of the javascript frameworks to download because all the article is a few KB but the page is the size of Windows 95 because of all the extra javascript that has to be downloaded that serves no useful purpose on the page.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by hey! ( 33014 )

          Sometimes web pages are so overengineered that I open them in Links 2, which is a text mode browser with basic image support. Any time you really just want the text content of the site it's the way to go.

  • I remember back in the mid to late 90's when the term 'AOL' was synonymous with the term 'Internet' and vice-versa. There literally were people who thought the Internet was just some confabulation dreamed up by AOL and once their access to AOL was cut off, so was their access to the internet. I don't mean to make fun of these people - AOL literally bombarded TV and Radio space with essentially this notion. They were even so ubiquitous that anytime a movie of that era needed to cue a scene of someone dialing

  • So, you pay them and they steal your identity? I thought that service was complimantary.

  • OK, it's very early here and I have a splitting headache (nor from drinking, it's a chronic affliction).
    But...

    "1.5 million monthly customers paying $9.99 or $14.99 per month for AOL Advantage"
    then
    "If average revenue per user is $10 per month, conservatively, that's $180 million of annual revenue."

    1.5 million multiplied by 15 (highest price per month) is $22,500,000 - so where do the rest of $157,500,000 come from?

  • Just because you and I can manage to reset our passwords and uninstall crapware, doesn't mean everyone is having an easy time with that. If there is decent human customer support to solve common problems for non-technical users, more power to them.

  • Ah AOL (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    About 19 years ago I used to work for a satellite company of AOL and we flew to Dulles one week. I remember sitting in a meeting where some marketing wonks were debating the merits of increasing the number of bookmarks a user could have in the fat client. It was something like 6 and they wanted to increase it to 8. The big issue was not the technical aspects of doing so, but whether customers would be confused and generate support calls. This in a nutshell was the mentality of the company - support calls. T
  • People paying for AOL Advantage probably don't know it's basically worthless. Windstream has almost the same protection plan. When I signed up, it was in pkg. After years, I looked at it closer and realized it was Windows only and I have Macs all along. Waste of $$$$ and cut it off. Windstream also very bad about upgrading the speed and telling you. Paying for 6 mbps when I could have gotten 25 mbps for same price, as an example.
  • She's been on the same email address since 1995.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      My uncle has had the same @aol address since 1996. There are a number of people who he only contacts every year or two that can't be relied on to update an email address so he keeps paying whatever the minimum payment is so that he can stay in touch.

  • There are many elderly people who got into the internet via AOL years ago, but they haven't been able to figure out how to move on. They still use modems and wouldn't be able to use wifi or a smart phone if they had them. Many still use POTS lines, because it's what they know. Sadly, all these things cost way more money than they should.

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