5 ms·

How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? “A Lot,”

34 points by obilgic 16y ago

qeorge 16y ago
One thing I never understood: My family has had an AOL account since v2.5 (1995?), but the discs never stopped coming. Always seemed like an obvious waste of money, with a trivial fix.
- loire280 16y ago
  Satisfied customers can give their discs to friends and family. In fact, sending discs to existing customers might be more effective, since a disc given to you by someone you trust must have a significantly higher success rate.
  - qeorge 16y ago
    Damn, that's a good point. Thanks, I've seriously been wondering about that for > 10 years.
- dhughes 16y ago
  My Aunt ditched AOL this past summer she was still on dial-up! Now she is on DSL and a bit nervous it's such a change after ten or more years. It's a powerful thing to have that support, AOL start page/"walled garden" instead of the wide open Internet. I swear near the end AOL was offering more hours than existed in a month.
samratjp 16y ago
So Quora has become the place for tech journalists to fish for the next article, not that there's anything wrong with it :-) (The Netflix postage cost question came up on Quora first, then you can guess which tech publication (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/quora-netflix/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/quora-netflix/) picked it up).
- obilgic 16y ago
  Example: http://www.quora.com/User-Interfaces/Why-do-in-restaurant-reservation-and-ordering-systems-seem-to-have-such-bad-UI http://www.quora.com/User-Interfaces/Why-do-in-restaurant-re... http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-web-sites-so-bad/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-w...
  - taylorbuley 16y ago
    Those are not the same topic (reservation systems vs. restaurant websites) but there are indeed many, many examples out there.
hardy263 16y ago
We got so many of them that my friends and I started using them as frisbees. Although the software was shoddy, the hardware provided some entertainment.
alain94040 16y ago
The real question for me is, where did they get my home address? I don't care so much about the cost for them of mailing the CDs, but what annoyed me more was how they got my name and address. Call them the first spammers of the digital age if you will.
- wallflower 16y ago
  If you're curious, run a public record search on yourself. The ones that cost money. It's all out there. From your mortgage outstanding (if you own) to your rental history (if you rent - to a lesser degree if you find rentals through Craigslist).
ck2 16y ago
There is no way they spent $35 per CD, even including design printing, boxing, mailing and the "free hours". Wouldn't a better question be how much they saved per employee by outsourcing nearly all their callcenter jobs? I would guess from $70 per person per day to $70 per month. And yet they are still hemorrhaging.
- samratjp 16y ago
  Unless I'm very much mistaken, I don't think the outsourcing of call centers back in the hey-days of AOL was that prevalent. That said, AOL isn't the first company to bank on sending out free stuff to get a lot of customers. I believe Schick gave out free disposable razors to nearly everyone in the States at a time when there were no disposable ones. After exhausting their seed money on sending those out once, they raised a lot of money for now customers were flocking out to buy one.
  - ck2 16y ago
    Sorry, I mean how they moved all the jobs from the states overseas in recent history. In the "hey-day" of AOL they were all around the country and a very big employer. But they ran their ship into the ground, by being stupid and greedy IMHO.
- zck 16y ago
  That's $35 per acquired user, not per CD. So if you figure that the cds cost a buck to make and ship, they acquired one user for every 35 CDs shipped. That seems high, considering how many I had lying around.
  - tzs 16y ago
    The fact that some businesses will pay $35 per acquired user also explains how some of those "free iPod" and similar offers worked. A typical one would require you to essentially get 5 people to sign up for their clients in order to earn your free iPod. If their clients were paying $35 per signup, that is $175 for the "free iPod" company for every iPod they have to give out, so the iPods aren't costing them net anywhere near as much as many would think at first. Also, it turns out it is a lot harder than people think to find 5 friends or coworkers that you can convince to sign up for one of the offers. The company still gets its $35 for each of the signups, without having to cough up an iPod.
Tichy 16y ago
Could the stunt be repeated today, using USB sticks perhaps?
- Retric 16y ago
  Why not just send CD's?
  - wtallis 16y ago
    Everybody has a USB port. Not all laptops these days have optical drives. Also, USB drives are a lot smaller, and can be just as thin (eg Crucial's Gizmo Jr.: http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8GBUFDJNR000 http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8GBUFD...)
jasonlbaptiste 16y ago
I have this theory that AOL warez/hacking/prog scene is the root of many startups that exist today. It's how I first learned to code by making punters. I had made the first punter for AOL 4.0, only to have my hard drive crash the day of release. This heavily demotivated me fyi. A few buddies of mine got started here. I've also read Zuck used to mess around in the scene. Aol was my first foray into the internet at the age of ten or so (maybe younger?). My screen name was JediForce3 (Yup, i was a true geek). I think it was Aol 2.5? Anyone else here used to mess around with AOL back in the day? Steve Case used to get a lot of crap, but I always respected him + looked up to him as the founder of AOL.
- qeorge 16y ago
  That's absolutely what got me into programming. As silly as "progs" were, it catalyzed me to learn the Windows API, how to find and share code online, and how to build my first website (for the purpose of sharing my AOL code). It even gave me my first experience working with a remote team. Now I run a web design and programming shop, with one of my best friends who stayed up on weekends with me "hacking" AOL in middle school. (SN was EatenByCow, was a member of "Unity" if that rings any bells.)
  - flyosity 16y ago
    Me too. I had a Mac so the Mac punter/prog scene was really tiny. Most of them were written using OneClick, a scriptable palette-building app to make on-screen widgets that fired off macros. Ah, those were the days! FWIW my punters were named AOElephant and Hex.
- bl4k 16y ago
  I found that AOL was nowhere near enough, wasn't 'true network' (I understood this at 10), was heavily criticized by the PC media because of this (which I also used to read) so I switched it off and discovered BBS's The BBS's were the foundation of almost every person I have met in tech, every job, all dev, every startup I have been involved with and there is a very strong camaraderie amongst the early BBS hackers (most of us went on to become v early web hackers). So I see from how inside AOL you think your theory might hold, but outside of it there was an entire larger network that was far more interesting
colinsidoti 16y ago
With the effectiveness of online advertising declining, I wonder if we'll start to see more physical promotions. Although, one could easily argue that physical advertisements are no longer used because the internet exists as a viable way to reach users. On a somewhat unrelated note, the CD promo led to one of my favorite commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OqQYk2TC-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OqQYk2TC-8
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

34 points by obilgic 16y ago

One thing I never understood: My family has had an AOL account since v2.5 (1995?), but the discs never stopped coming. Always seemed like an obvious waste of money, with a trivial fix.

loire280 16y ago
Satisfied customers can give their discs to friends and family. In fact, sending discs to existing customers might be more effective, since a disc given to you by someone you trust must have a significantly higher success rate.
- qeorge 16y ago
  Damn, that's a good point. Thanks, I've seriously been wondering about that for > 10 years.
dhughes 16y ago
My Aunt ditched AOL this past summer she was still on dial-up! Now she is on DSL and a bit nervous it's such a change after ten or more years. It's a powerful thing to have that support, AOL start page/"walled garden" instead of the wide open Internet. I swear near the end AOL was offering more hours than existed in a month.

samratjp 16y ago

So Quora has become the place for tech journalists to fish for the next article, not that there's anything wrong with it :-) (The Netflix postage cost question came up on Quora first, then you can guess which tech publication (http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/quora-netflix/ http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/04/quora-netflix/) picked it up).

obilgic 16y ago
Example: http://www.quora.com/User-Interfaces/Why-do-in-restaurant-reservation-and-ordering-systems-seem-to-have-such-bad-UI http://www.quora.com/User-Interfaces/Why-do-in-restaurant-re... http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-web-sites-so-bad/ http://www.juliansanchez.com/2010/12/27/why-are-restaurant-w...
- taylorbuley 16y ago
  Those are not the same topic (reservation systems vs. restaurant websites) but there are indeed many, many examples out there.

hardy263 16y ago

We got so many of them that my friends and I started using them as frisbees. Although the software was shoddy, the hardware provided some entertainment.

alain94040 16y ago

The real question for me is, where did they get my home address? I don't care so much about the cost for them of mailing the CDs, but what annoyed me more was how they got my name and address. Call them the first spammers of the digital age if you will.

wallflower 16y ago
If you're curious, run a public record search on yourself. The ones that cost money. It's all out there. From your mortgage outstanding (if you own) to your rental history (if you rent - to a lesser degree if you find rentals through Craigslist).

ck2 16y ago

There is no way they spent $35 per CD, even including design printing, boxing, mailing and the "free hours". Wouldn't a better question be how much they saved per employee by outsourcing nearly all their callcenter jobs? I would guess from $70 per person per day to $70 per month. And yet they are still hemorrhaging.

samratjp 16y ago
Unless I'm very much mistaken, I don't think the outsourcing of call centers back in the hey-days of AOL was that prevalent. That said, AOL isn't the first company to bank on sending out free stuff to get a lot of customers. I believe Schick gave out free disposable razors to nearly everyone in the States at a time when there were no disposable ones. After exhausting their seed money on sending those out once, they raised a lot of money for now customers were flocking out to buy one.
- ck2 16y ago
  Sorry, I mean how they moved all the jobs from the states overseas in recent history. In the "hey-day" of AOL they were all around the country and a very big employer. But they ran their ship into the ground, by being stupid and greedy IMHO.
zck 16y ago
That's $35 per acquired user, not per CD. So if you figure that the cds cost a buck to make and ship, they acquired one user for every 35 CDs shipped. That seems high, considering how many I had lying around.
- tzs 16y ago
  The fact that some businesses will pay $35 per acquired user also explains how some of those "free iPod" and similar offers worked. A typical one would require you to essentially get 5 people to sign up for their clients in order to earn your free iPod. If their clients were paying $35 per signup, that is $175 for the "free iPod" company for every iPod they have to give out, so the iPods aren't costing them net anywhere near as much as many would think at first. Also, it turns out it is a lot harder than people think to find 5 friends or coworkers that you can convince to sign up for one of the offers. The company still gets its $35 for each of the signups, without having to cough up an iPod.

Tichy 16y ago

Could the stunt be repeated today, using USB sticks perhaps?

Retric 16y ago
Why not just send CD's?
- wtallis 16y ago
  Everybody has a USB port. Not all laptops these days have optical drives. Also, USB drives are a lot smaller, and can be just as thin (eg Crucial's Gizmo Jr.: http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8GBUFDJNR000 http://www.crucial.com/store/partspecs.aspx?IMODULE=CT8GBUFD...)

jasonlbaptiste 16y ago

I have this theory that AOL warez/hacking/prog scene is the root of many startups that exist today. It's how I first learned to code by making punters. I had made the first punter for AOL 4.0, only to have my hard drive crash the day of release. This heavily demotivated me fyi. A few buddies of mine got started here. I've also read Zuck used to mess around in the scene. Aol was my first foray into the internet at the age of ten or so (maybe younger?). My screen name was JediForce3 (Yup, i was a true geek). I think it was Aol 2.5? Anyone else here used to mess around with AOL back in the day? Steve Case used to get a lot of crap, but I always respected him + looked up to him as the founder of AOL.

qeorge 16y ago
That's absolutely what got me into programming. As silly as "progs" were, it catalyzed me to learn the Windows API, how to find and share code online, and how to build my first website (for the purpose of sharing my AOL code). It even gave me my first experience working with a remote team. Now I run a web design and programming shop, with one of my best friends who stayed up on weekends with me "hacking" AOL in middle school. (SN was EatenByCow, was a member of "Unity" if that rings any bells.)
- flyosity 16y ago
  Me too. I had a Mac so the Mac punter/prog scene was really tiny. Most of them were written using OneClick, a scriptable palette-building app to make on-screen widgets that fired off macros. Ah, those were the days! FWIW my punters were named AOElephant and Hex.
bl4k 16y ago
I found that AOL was nowhere near enough, wasn't 'true network' (I understood this at 10), was heavily criticized by the PC media because of this (which I also used to read) so I switched it off and discovered BBS's The BBS's were the foundation of almost every person I have met in tech, every job, all dev, every startup I have been involved with and there is a very strong camaraderie amongst the early BBS hackers (most of us went on to become v early web hackers). So I see from how inside AOL you think your theory might hold, but outside of it there was an entire larger network that was far more interesting

colinsidoti 16y ago

With the effectiveness of online advertising declining, I wonder if we'll start to see more physical promotions. Although, one could easily argue that physical advertisements are no longer used because the internet exists as a viable way to reach users. On a somewhat unrelated note, the CD promo led to one of my favorite commercials: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OqQYk2TC-8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OqQYk2TC-8

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]