Topic: AOL loses one third of its subscribers in one year

[Clive]

AOL, once a goliath among Internet service providers, is continuing to lose subscribers at a rapid pace. According to Time Warner?s Q3 results filed earlier today, the company now has 10.1 million subscribers, which is down 851,000 from Q2 and down 5.1 million or 33% year over year. Before the merger with Time Warner in 2001, the company said that it had more than 30 million subscribers.

According to Time Warner the firm?s revised strategy to refocus its business from subscribers to advertising is to blame for the subscriber loss. The company also sold off several of its overseas businesses over the past year, including AOL France, Germany and UK, and noted that its subscription service became less attractive as the company decided to offer its email service free of charge.   

Time Warner said that AOL revenues declined 38% or $745 million from $1.96 billion to $1.22 billion year over year. Subscription revenues declined by 56% during this time. Operating income declined by 24% or $95 million from $390 to $295 million in the same period. 

 

[Simon]

That's because it's crap! 

[GillE]

I'd swap to another provider but I keep hearing horror stories about all ISPs.

[Simon]

As Rik would have said, had I not beaten him to it, you wouldn't hear any horror stories about IDNet, Gill.  I'm very happy with them, but had I not gone to them from Pipex, I would probably have chosen Zen. 

[Rik]

IDNet, Newnet, Zen all have good reps, Simon. IDNet just has a better forum. 

[Reno]

Yeah people have been switching to broadband for along time now. Who wants to wait a minute for each page load?

[GillE]

The only problem with those ISPs is that they have a capped download service.

Incidentally, Bob, broadband is pretty much standard over here no matter what the ISP.  My AOL connection is ADSL.

[Simon]

You'd be hard pushed to find one with absolutely no restrictions these days, Gill.  Unless, of course, you want to pay mega bucks. 

[Reno]

Over here in the states AOL is mostly known as a nationwide dialup service. An aol customer uses their cd to install the AOL browser along with 10 other aol applications. Once aol is on a computer it's hard to remove and a resource hog. The dialup service also cost about the same for a base generic dsl subscription. It just doesn't make sense to stick with them. Especially considering with a regular dsl connection you don't need to install any special browser or connection client to get online.

They might do business differently in the UK, but thats the main reason I use to tell my customers with aol over here to switch.

[Simon]

I think it's much the same here, Bob.  I'm pretty sure you have to use the AOL browser to access the Internet, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

[GillE]

I think it's much the same here, Bob.  I'm pretty sure you have to use the AOL browser to access the Internet, but someone will correct me if I'm wrong.

I've never used the AOL browser to peruse the internet - it's just too unwieldy.  Yes, AOL can be a resource hog but only if you allow it to set itself as the default application for videos, music and other applications.  Users can equally install another browser such as Firefox or Opera and use that as an alternative.  In fact, I'm hooked up through AOL as I write this on Firefox and I can watch videos through Media Player Classic, Winamp, or whatever takes my fancy.

Many of the criticisms of AOL are completely justified but I've yet to encounter anything that I can't work around very easily - and I'm pretty much a computer numpty!  The one feature that keeps me loyal to AOL is the fact that it's uncapped.  That's got to be worth a lot of credit.