For years I’ve considered AOL to be an over-priced service with limited features hampered by slow, bloated, buggy software. However, AOL has eliminated one of those objections.
As of August 3, AOL began offering its software, e-mail, and other services free of charge to broadband users. Dial-up customers will begin paying $10 a month, down from as much as $26 a month.
AOL will actually increase their revenues with this model, making up the difference in price with volume. No, wait: they will cut costs by no longer sending out three billion CDs every month and they have let go 6,000 customer service employees whose sole job was to not cancel your service when you asked them to. Okay, seriously: they’re making so much money on the advertising they flash at you in their software that they plan to expand their advertising.
For those of you determined to keep your AOL, this is a win in two ways. First, if you’re a broadband user, your monthly cost for Internet services may have been cut by as much as 70%. Second, if you’re a dial-up user, there’s no excuse for not moving to broadband. Rates for DSL are lower than dial-up used to be and, once you switch to broadband you’ll never look back.
Interestingly, AOL will also offer—for free—their new My eAddress service in September. My eAddress will allow any Internet user to claim a domain (e.g., mydomain.com) and have up to 100 “email identities” (e.g., you@mydomain.com) for sending and receiving mail. Presumably the advertising on the web interface will pay for the service.
My take? If you’re not an AOL customer, don’t start. If you’re on dial-up, move up to broadband. And if you’re on broadband, start considering a life outside of AOL—the grass really is greener on the other side.
