Back when Geocities was a thing, AOL ruled the Internet as the dominant ISP. After all, their sales strategy of stuffing newspaper circulars with dial-up CD-ROMS was brilliant. And so, by the turn of the millennium, AOL’s subscriber base stood at about 25 million people.
However, as the story goes, AOL stayed the same over the years while everyone else modernized. Thus, the ISP has lost about two to five million subscribers annually, though remarkably, 3.5 million people still dial-in to AOL in 2011, suffering through the screeching tones of 56K while hundreds of millions access a world of Wi-Fi and 4G on their smartphones.
Worryingly for AOL, dial-up service currently accounts for about 40% of the company’s total revenue. No wonder Huffington Post, its latest high-profile acquisition, can’t pay most of its contributors.
[via Business Insider]
