9 ms·
AOL has had perhaps the softest landing of any obsolete tech company, because their dialup revenue has been declining very, very slowly, less than 10% per year.
by _delirium 12y ago
AOL has had perhaps the softest landing of any obsolete tech company, because their dialup revenue has been declining very, very slowly, less than 10% per year. And that is partly offset by profit margins increasing every year. People seem to just not cancel. Some are still dialing up, but plenty of people have kept paying $10/mo for dialup service they don't even use. Perhaps they just forgot. Or they use the @aol.com email through the web interface, and don't realize that you can keep your email address after cancelling the ISP service (to be fair, that didn't used to be the case, and many people missed the change). So AOL's had many billions of dollars of basically "free" revenue to cushion their decline. Even in 2014, they had roughly $600m of ISP revenue, of which about 2/3 was profit.
- amyjess 12y agoAlso, before Wi-Fi became as ubiquitous as it is today, the only reliable way to get an Internet connection in a motel room was to dial into an AOL POP, so anybody who would expect to take a road trip would keep their AOL accounts active. I think by 2006, almost every motel had free Wi-Fi though... and that wasn't the case in 2003 (at least, that's what I remember from road trips in those years). Edit: Actually, I remember now that Earthlink POPs were as reliable as AOL POPs, but AOL had better name recognition.
- _delirium 12y agoAh right! Yes, that's definitely true, I remember using AOL dial-up a few times in the early/mid-2000s. My parents had kept their account because of the @aol.com email issue (AOL webmail only became free in 2005), so I used their account to connect from motels.