Dial-Up Problems
How to save AOL? Make it more like TV! Everybody loves TV, right?
Miller wants to divide AOL’s 25 million U.S. subscribers into six groups and serve them news, advertising and other features tailored to their interests.
The segmentation strategy is consistent with the renewed focus on subscribers that is the mantra of AOL Vice Chairman Ted Leonsis, who says the company has lost its way in recent years by letting big advertising deals drive its content, rather than catering to the interests of its members. AOL subscribers pay $23.90 a month for dial-up access to the Internet and to receive exclusive content.
I used AOL as my backup ISP for several years. Under the “BYON” (Bring Your Own Network) plan, I paid ten bucks a month to keep in touch with my many friends who used AOL. AOL jacked up the price, and so I left.
Their original content wasn’t worth fifteen dollars, since it mostly consisted of grainy RealPlayer movie trailer videos — and RealPlayer had a nasty habit of crashing my system, reassigning my default players (even when told not to) and leaving a string of ugly pop-ups every time I tried to close it.
And that’s to say nothing of AOL’s rudimentary email system (essentially unchanged since the early ’90s or earlier), annoying advertising, and endless shilling for Time-Warner stuff. “Synergy” is business-speak for “interminable boosterism.”
Now they want to make it more like the wreck that is cable television? Spare us, please.
If AOL wants to survive, they
I paid the $15/mo. for awhile, but recently I decided it wasn’t worth it. I called to quit, and the AOL rep: (1) dropped my price to $7.95/mo. as a special promotion for non-AOL broadband users; (2) gave me 3 free months; and (3) invited me to defray most of the cost of AOL by doing a couple surveys per month at Opinion Place (Keyword:OP). So for now I’m keeping AOL as a way to stay connected with my friends in the “AOL community”.
Just like the mailer, the newsreader hasn’t changed, and it sucks pretty hard. Every new AOL version brings a huge load of hype, but not much real improvement. And you need to buy add-ons like BPS Powertools to get features that should be standard, such as Power Ignore for chatrooms.
BPS? Oh, my god, that brings back memories. Yes, that was the only thing that kept the chat rooms sane.
Ya gotta like the nuts over at AOL, tho. Fog is thickening, and they call for Full Steam Ahead.
Damn AOL. They’ve been double billing me $20 something per month for over 6 months. Keep saying that they’ll fix and credit. Just got my latest bill, guess what? No fix. So I’ve stopped all payments on my Visa and filling a complaint with BBB. Had decided to keep as backup to DSL, but no more.
I keep those “1000 hours free” CDs I get in the mail for when my ISP goes down, but I hate how it puts all kinds of crap on your computer. A-O-Hell must survive on people who don’t know any better.
And if you believe that tripe about catering to your ‘special’ interests, be prepared to surrender all rights to access anything other than those sites deemed ‘politically correct’ by AOL. There are any number of interests that they do not feel meet “their” criteria for ‘acceptable to our community’, or other “agenda-blather-speak”.
Six content categories doesn’t sound like very sophisticated content management – more like reorganizing repurposed Time Warner print content based on the same broader advertising demographic targeting used in selling print or cable TV.
They’ve lost any advantage they had in the online ad space because the proprietary service (Rainman) can’t deliver anything approaching value for the advertiser, so they are backpeddling to a model that advertisers understand, mass reach based on general demographics.
The real problem with AOL is the business plan or “mission statement”. Their plan is to place a user in a box that is isolated from the rest of the web and then supply that customer with selected data. They do this by using a different language than the rest of the web. Whenever I send pictures to AOL people they reply that they don’t have the picture. They make it as difficult as possible to access MSIE so customers can privately browse.
For lots of people, 25 million of them, this is a great system that serves their needs perfectly.
The price: endless ads, constant pop ups, inability to access certain sites is far too high for many of us who surf the web. Their news group structure is horrid and their email is not nearly as good as Outlook Express—-FOR ME.
They have an even worse problem: the Wall Street insistance for GROWTH. This is a trap for lots of businesses. I think their current drive to serve customersd better may pay off. Twenty Five million customers is a dream base for any business.
TO: Stephen Green
RE: Saving AOL?
Why bother.
Based on your report, AOL is apparently still doing the sort of jerking clients around that drove me away from them 12 years ago.
I say, “Anyone stupid enough to stay with AOL after getting burned once, deserves whatever they get.”
Regards,
Chuck(le)
[Ignorance is when you don't know something. Stupidity is ignorance with pride.]
Correction: 7 years ago….
fred – rainman isn’t used for all of aol’s publishing, just for the most internal pages, like their welcome screen. and the vast majority of their advertising doesn’t go through rainman, they have their own system for ad delivery, and it’ll support anything you can throw at it, limited only by the page owner’s decision as to what sort of content to offer. i can say with confidence that aol’s advertising publishing system is actually better designed and more flexible then their actual content publishing system, having spent the past two years testing both of them.
before aol will be able to substantially improve their content, they’re going to need to upgrade their subscriber base. right now most of them are still dialup, and so long as that’s the case, it means less rich content, which takes more time to download.
I’ve been using cable internet for over a year after being with MSN and Earthlink. Nothing I’ve seen rivals cable. Furthermore, I don’t seem to get as much advertising outta my cable company as I did with MSN or Earthlink. Cable just lets you surf ….very fast I might add.
Cheers
Celeste – You’re absolutely right about the vast majority of content not being served by Rainman, but the overall technical and editorial guidelines set by the original system still linger, severely tying the hands of anyone trying to deliver an effective advertising message (beyond standard direct-response messages). I don’t only mean rich media, but just offering adequate lower-bandwidth message space.
In addition, the advertising and editorial sides of the house are in open conflict with each other (a subset being the Time Warner and AOL sides). Subscriber base improvement is a priority, especially with the turnover rates speculated within the industry, but advertising ability and flexibility are falling behind the competition.
I’m trying to picture me caring whether AOL sinks or swims, but I’m not really big on abstract art.