AOL Buys Bebo For $850 Million > A day late

reply to supergirl

Re: A day late

AOl still has money to piss away from it's parent company. My honest opinion, AOL made a major mistake by going to a free service. The minute that happened, my mother can canceled the account I had with them for nearly 10 years. I had set her up under my account and she still utilized the dialup. She didn't need anything more. However, when it became free, she got broadband and just used the tcp / ip aol as she wanted to maintain her email. Long story short, that was a major mistake as I'm sure that contributed to people jumping ship. If I were an exec @ AOL, I would have set dialup to 10 dollars a month, and Bring your own broadband (BYOB) for 5. Next, I would have utilized Time Warner's name and Company to offer exclusive content to AOL subscribers. This might include a section where BYOB and possibly dialup users (in lower quality) could have streamed shows and privileged content. Hence, making it worth the BYOB person to pay a few to stick around, even if nominal.

Dialup is like 24 dollars a month. They actually UPPED the price. Bring your own broadband is free. That's the add supported part of AOL. However, being MOST people have broadband, you just killed your revenue by going to that model. Their ad supported idea is sinking faster than the titanic. Instead of making money, they are failing to generate the revenue from ads they predicted.

Ah I see.. last time used AOL was back in 2001 and that was the final time I used it.

Unfortunately, AOL has some half assed execs. The big thing today is streaming video and movies. As I said, Time Warner is a major studio and partner. If AOL execs had any common sense, they would have utilized this to their benefit. As I said, setting dialup at 10 dollars a month is fair. That's NetZero's price. Also, setting BYOB to 5 means you get revenue still for people with their own connections. As stated above, the streaming video part and lower priced would have offset many of the losses AOL sees today. Unfortunately, they aren't thinking ahead. If I were them at this point, I would drop dialup to 10 and save face with the customers that are left. Their idea of buying social networking places is pissing money they simply don;t have. It would be better spent on advertising and revamping their service.

reply to jc100