Dial-up is still the main revenue source for AOL | Hacker News Reader

Dial-up is still the main revenue source for AOL

cir.ca

20 pointsindiekid16 comments

Headline, and article, is sensationalist.

The article states "that its Membership Group — the division that includes its dial-up Internet business — still generates most of the company's revenue".

According to the Yahoo! report[1] it includes every membership service (such as Mail):

"The Membership Group, which consists of offerings that serve AOL’s registered account holders, both free and paid, and are focused on delivering world-class experiences to AOL’s loyal users who rely on these AOL products and properties every day. The results for this segment include AOL’s subscription offerings and advertising offerings on Membership Group properties, such as AOL Mail, as well as from performance compensation for marketing third party products and services."

[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/aol-reports-revenue-growth-fir...

I do not find this surprising at all. I realize it is not dial-up, but my in-laws who pay >$70/month for high-speed broadband are still convinced that AOL is the only route to the "Internet". I cannot convince them otherwise.

I wondering how much of this is comprised of auto-renewed subscriptions that people don't even realize they're paying for.

Or people who have broadband, but keep paying for AOL's dialup service because they don't realize they think they need to in order to keep their AOL email and instant messaging accounts.

That said, I'd like to have a closer look at the numbers before jumping to any conclusions. Nowadays the situation might be complicated a bit by the fact that AOL bundles "backup dial-up" service in with their packages of paid services that are primarily intended for broadband users.

https://www.quora.com/AOL/Did-AOL-make-it-hard-to-cancel-in-...

This website messes with my back button. Nobody messes with my back button. Also, terrible design.

Wow, outside of a very small handful of sites is the web still usable on dial up?

until my grandparents passed away their entire use for "the internet" was AOL and that only to receive pictures of their grandchildren. I think I may have some other older relatives who use the net and/or AOL simply for email.

If you have an iPhone, switch to EDGE for something roughly approximating the dialup experience. (I think it's a bit faster, but they're in the same ballpark.)

EDGE tops out at over four times the speed of dialup, amazingly enough.

But AFAIK EDGE almost never gets anywhere close to its theoretical speed limit while 56k modems are usually very close, so in practice EDGE might be something like 50-100% faster.

They had a 10 year or so golden opportunity to pivot and try different models backed by dial-up revenue.

I'd say that they failed

How do you define failure?

What do they have going for the next 1-5-10 years? A few blogs?

Oddly enough, they're still a company worth roughly $2.17 billion. I'd certainly be happy with that failure.

Me too--even with 170K at this point in my life, but let's look at where AOL was and the chances they had.

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