Remember those days when connecting to the Internet meant dialing up a connection that sounded like nails scraping against a chalkboard broadcast over a transistor radio? Trying to access your email in the evenings was usually an hour-long affair, you could make dinner and do the dishes while waiting for a Web site to load and those damned CDs. You know, the ones from AOL that you’d find everywhere in creative packaging that advertised 4000 hours of free Internet time to be used in a month?
Dial-up made AOL big. So big that it used $147 billion of inflated stock to buy Time-Warner in 2001–an event known to many as one of the most disastrous business deals in history. Well Andrew Vanacore at the AP reports that AOL is back to being an independent company after years of hemorrhaging revenue. It’s now only a tiny sliver of what it once was. In fact, I’m not sure what the heck they do now. Their homepage features light gossip, some fancy skins and free email that hardly anyone in my contact list uses.
From the looks of it, chief executive Tim Armstrong wants to turn the company towards the growing SEO market. But according to some digging by reporters New York Times reporters Rolfe Winkler and Martin Hutchinson, a fifth of traffic to their site comes from people who still have dial-up Internet who sign on to check their mail–a population that will only get smaller as those people either get fed up or die.
AOL is one of the oldest existing Internet companies. Remember those CDs? They’re collectors’ items now, with some going for about $10/disc! Advertising, schmadvertising. That’s where the money is, Armstrong!
