My skeptical bearish friends, will you believe anything anything about AOL as long as it's bad. (Let's remember the recent survey that said online usage declined. It did because the survey left out 1 million CompuServe members in Europe who had been counted in the previous survey. It also said AOL only added 300,000 of the 800,000 subscribers actually added. Oh well, missed it by that much.) Let's also remember that if you're so critical of the biases of Wall Street analysts -- whose institutional clients have billions riding on the sincerity of those opinions -- let's be aware of how much of a stake traditional Madison Ave. execs have in saying that AOL is going nowhere without them. The MSNBC story does, in fact, take time out to warn that these critics may be the very people who have missed the boat, so they may not be the right people to ask about how things are going on the journey.
It's all good fodder for the ongoing debate.
Here's some more from former Netguide columnist Robert Seidman, who is often quite critical of AOL's antics.
>You remember all those pundits' claiming AOL was dead.
>I know some of you were hoping those folks were right.
>Sorry. AOL isn't going anywhere. Right now, it will only
>get bigger. I was actually surprised to see how much AOL
>grew during the warm months of June, July and August.
>...with $68 million in e-commerce and advertising revenue,
>AOL is booking more annual revenue than CNET, Yahoo!, Excite
>and Lycos combined, according to the Motley Fool. COMBINED!
>In looking at some other numbers, Simba's Advertising and
>Marketplace report stated that for the September quarter,
>the top SEVENTEEN web sites combined for $85 million in
>advertising. So on the one hand, AOL appears to be dominating
>in the online advertising space, but it still has a lot of
>work to do to get other revenues to account for a larger
>percentage of its overall revenue.
>COMBINED!
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