I think AOL had a classic tagline 'So easy to use no wonder we're number one' which resonated with non-techies coming online in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

I think AOL had a classic tagline 'So easy to use no wonder we're number one' which resonated with non-techies coming online in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Suddenly you had all these people wanting the internet and AOL made it easy with flooding the mailboxes of people with CDs. It was a sequence of events for which they just happened upon the massive uptake due to their marketing. I don't think this was particularly planned by AOL since if they truly understood what they were doing then they'd have known dialup was limited due to the uptake of broadband. It's analogous to Apple realizing the iPod was limited and music players would merge into cell phones as people only want to carry one device. Apple launched the iPhone at exactly the right time. AOL didn't have any answer to broadband.