1998 is the later days of AOL. Its heyday was 1991-1995, when basically everybody got multiple AOL disks in the mail, you'd have TV advertisements telling you to visit a certain AOL keyword, and they were basically the only user-friendly way of getting online. (The competition like Prodigy or Compuserve had very clunky user interfaces, and GEnie and BBSes were text-only.)

The writing was on the wall for AOL as soon as Netscape and Yahoo came out in 1994.