In My Experience... | A drop in subs. (1087)

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A drop in subs.
[ Posted by Dan on January 31, 2003 | 1 Comments ]

The $100 billion dollar, year over year loss reported by AOL Time Warner concerns me less than the price of pickles in Pakistan. What does scare the shit out of me is this...

AOL's customer numbers fell by 170,000 in the last quarter, despite the aggressive launch of the latest version of its access software AOL 8.0, the giveaway of millions of free CDs offering trials of the service and an outlay of more than Ł600m on advertising and promotion.

A drop in subscriptions is not good. I always thought that there would be an increase of subs at AOL due in part to the massive promotions, but more importantly the points of presence (POPs) that AOL has. I never been anywhere that I couldn't get a local AOL dial-in phone number, and that ubiquity is valuable to me. A drop in subs really surprizes me.

Hmm. I've only been to one place in the states... some bizarre little community in southern illinois where I had to stop at a hotel because there were more tornadoes on the road than cars... (well, ok, there were 4 tornadoes and I couldn't see far enough to count any cars).

They had some weird little coop phone company, and everything outside that small town was not only long distance, but expensive long distance (not just hotel surcharges, either).
Fortunately, AOL has that 800 number and I was able to get online with that and it only cost me a few bucks to send off a few emails letting everyone know I was alive and would be home a day late.

And that's really about the only reason I still have an AOL account... cable's great, but you can't take it with you.

-Posted by jc on January 31, 2003 04:40 PM

Comment posting has been turned off because I don't have enough time and will to deal with the constant comment spamming. I'm very sorry and will fix this sometime soon (soon = before 2004 ends).