{"id":449,"date":"2006-08-02T23:36:38","date_gmt":"2006-08-03T03:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/02\/aol-joins-the-party-five-years-late\/"},"modified":"2006-08-02T23:36:38","modified_gmt":"2006-08-03T03:36:38","slug":"aol-joins-the-party-five-years-late","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/02\/aol-joins-the-party-five-years-late\/","title":{"rendered":"AOL joins the party five years late"},"content":{"rendered":"

If nothing else, the much-discussed decision to make America Online’s software<\/a> and services completely free will result in a great laboratory experiment on a truly grand scale, an experiment that will hopefully answer this compelling question: Can a moribund online service — one whose very name has become synonymous with the word “lame,” one whose services are notoriously difficult to cancel, and one which has remained steadfastly a “walled garden” while all around it the benefits of advertising have become abundantly obvious — suddenly undergo a deathbed conversion and become an ad-driven online colossus after years of appearing to not really give a crap?<\/p>\n

Time Warner is obviously hoping the answer is yes. The business case is somewhat easier to make<\/a> than it appeared at first, since the media and entertainment conglomerate will be giving up a billion dollars or so in revenue from customers who currently pay for the luxury of having an aol.com email , but will also save the truckloads of dough it spends on marketing costs, including those billions of sign-up CDs that litter the planet (hint: they make a nice wind-chime style mobile for over the baby’s crib). And online ad revenues are growing strongly<\/a> at AOL, which no doubt gives TW hope. Staci has a great breakdown<\/a> of the conference call at PaidContent.<\/p>\n

But the bigger question is how many people will decide to use AOL’s services when they are free, and no longer attached to the company’s dial-up software. Is it too late, or can the company make some kind of prodigal son-type comeback?<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If nothing else, the much-discussed decision to make America Online’s software and services completely free will result in a great laboratory experiment on a truly grand scale, an experiment that will hopefully answer this compelling question: Can a moribund online service — one whose very name has become synonymous with the word “lame,” one whose … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “AOL joins the party five years late”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=449"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/449\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}