Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

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There are far more than "occasional" AOL email addresses...

I just checked mailing list stats for our largest UK customer - where AOL never reached penetration anywhere near the US - and while AOL is by no means huge, they're the fourth largest e-mail provider represented on their list, after Hotmail (which out-distances everyone by a wide margin in the UK) and Gmail / Yahoo (which one is in second depends on whether you count Yahoo's various partnerships - they provide e-mail and other content services for some major ISPs).

Techies in particular tends to get very surprised when they realize that the entire world don't use Gmail... (gmail accounts for about 9%-10% of the subscribers on that list, compared to about 35% for Hotmail...)

This is a restaurant chain that covers a pretty good cross section of the UK, with a list of near a million users.

They're also a broadband (ADSL) provider in the UK though, so a fair portion of those could be 'legitimate' current customers.

Sort of. AOL Broadband is actually a brand operated by Talk Talk. They acquired AOL UK excluding the content business back in 2006.

You're right that probably does account for a lot of AOL addresses, though. But the size of Talk Talk as a whole (don't know the breakdown between the Talk Talk brand and AOL brand for their ADSL) is too small to account for even a majority of the AOL addresses, and there are disproportionally many AOL addresses vs. market share compared to other operators like BT.

Why does a restaurant chain have a mailing list of a million customers?

I know some restaurants will offer birthday coupons for joining their mailing list, which might attribute to the large amount of customers on one.

Have you ever ordered pizza online?

People want offers. We're in the process of helping them clean up their mailing list at the moment, and the open rate is rapidly getting to the 30% range for ordinary offer e-mails and coupons, and much more for "special" offers (like 50% off vouchers).

Especially since the financial crisis, people have been very budget conscious, and a lot of people are on these mailinglists to get offers for lunch etc.

We actually have a nice timeline of the crisis: When Lehmans toppled, bookings at the restaurants of our clients near their building shot through the roof. And looking back at bounce stats, we can tell which firms had large layoffs when, as we suddenly had 30% of addresses at one city firm bounce, 50% of another, and so on.

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