At the New York Times David Pogue tells us nothing very illuminating about AOL's move from fee to free. PaidContent summarises his unremarkable conclusion -
"Pogue writes that AOL is “not for the technically proficient.” So the
new AOL is targeted at those relatively new to computers and online or
those whose technical skills are similar to those new to either world.
And how is that different from the old AOL?"
This strategy is, as Roger Ehrenbeg demonstrates point by point, no evidence at all of 2.0 bubble. What's really been happening at AOL? People didn't want to leave AOL, even at $26 a month, because their @AOL email address had been their persistent digital identity since as long as they'd been online. But AOL was an expensive, bowdlerised walled garden. A lot of people had been willing to put up with that for a long time to keep their @AOL ID. Life is all about selecting from amongst alternatives and living with both the pros and cons of those decisions.
The advent of cheap, simple broadband tipped the balance against the expensive, dial-up walled garden, and AOL had to shoot for a free model before it lost its most valuable asset - its position as web page1 for eighteen million people. 300,000 people a month (Tuscaloosanews) were cancelling their AOL account and giving up on years of being @AOL. The question for AOL was not whether a 100% price reduction was crazy, but whether the necessity of that move could be made to work.
Now the biggest barrier to has been removed to18 million members keeping their persistent digital identity @AOL - what can it find to do with that vast pool of captive attention? That's not a trivial question to answer, but at least they're starting from the right place by putting an end to the attention haemorrhage of the past year (18 million users is down from 35 million at AOL's zenith). This is nothing to do with a 2.0 bubble. This is AOL realising the value of attention (Bubblegeneration) and moving to capitalise on its assets in that space.
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