"Who's the U-Boat Commander?
"
-- Service Manager after Tom Cruise
puts his dads Porsche in Lake
Michigan (Risky Business)
How do you mess up a business this badly? AOL had 35 million subscribers at its peak. See the NYT's quote below...it will lose 33% of its subscribers in the next year, which is already down 50% from its peak. It just goes to show how if you can see how the competition is going to eat your lunch, get to the lunch box early yourself and start eating...Technology moves too quickly and Darwin always strikes quickly.
NYT's today: "The jobs eliminated by the current cutbacks will largely not be replaced. An AOL spokesman said that the company had not ruled out further layoffs but that none were in current plans. AOL has said it expects to lose at least six million of its 17.7 million subscribers in the next year and more than nine million in total over three years."
Good point on AOL's past business but it is good to see them finally making the leap into the future in a big way. They realize subscriptions are not going to pay the bills and are now becoming more of a content business. I believe I saw a stat yesterday that mentioned that AOL's ad revenue was up over 40% yoy. Not bad at all and its no wonder why they are focusing on content.
I think they can be very successful with this new content oriented approach even though they are a bit late to the game. Quick example: I believe I saw somewhere that they have over 1 million users for their feed reader product (yup, who knew AOL even had a feed reader) and it appears that they can easily get users for anything they put on the market.
Posted by: Eric Olson | August 05, 2006 at 12:30 PM
I'm also glad as well. It is just sad that they took so long before abandoning their walled garden approach. Think of the impact they would have had with 2-3x the subscribers and Yahoo/Google/Digg/etc as much smaller players.
I wonder if they would have done it sooner had they not been imbedded in the bowels of a traditional, slow-moving media company.
They have some serious catching up to do. Lot of bigger competitors like Bloglines and My Yahoo RSS users. They will have to take full advantage of every part of their current franchise and subscriber base.
Posted by: mbmccall | August 05, 2006 at 10:44 PM
Good call. They could have been huge in new media if they made a move sooner.
Posted by: Eric Olson | August 07, 2006 at 04:06 PM