The increase in "other revenues" (advertising and online transactions] looked pretty positive.
I expect "other revenues" to take a dramatic downturn for a while. Would you continue to shell out marketing money to this company if you suddenly found you were getting only about 1/3rd the exposure you were led to believe you'd have? I arrive at the 1/3rd figure by assuming only about 2.5 million of the 8 million "subscribers" are actually getting in and able to stay in long enough to be exposed to the ads, based on the current 31:1 ratio.
It also appears they are going to alienate most of the "Company Connection" participants. I would expect that most of these folks are also among their big advertisers and if they leave, they're taking their advertising with them. And may very well sue because of exposure promises made that had no hopes of being fulfilled. True, the "Company Connection" has been, in essence, a free ride for those companies (200 of them) using it, but they've also been a draw for AOL. It has been a symbiotic relationship which will probably not continue.
meaningful (eg more than 50k at risk) positions shorting this stock? Or is it mostly just electronic opinion?
Does this really have anything to do with the validity of the points raised? I stand to gain or lose comparatively little money on this company. I just feel very strongly about where it's headed, and the reasons for it, and am laboring under the mistaken belief that people really want to hear what I have to say about it. <grin> The monetary impact of this company on my portfolio either way isn't enough to make it a motivator for my posts.
My position, summarized: This company is in big trouble short-term, but will eventually emerge as a solid company. It is a BBS that wants to be an ISP. When they finally get to where they belong (a destination rather than an on-ramp) they'll do quite well. This position is supported by their announcement that 86% of their activity is for their proprietary content; 14% for the WWW. They apparently understand this to a certain extent with their move to "Bring your own provider" type of access. Until they get more focused on folks getting in via TCP/IP rather than dial-up, they're going to suffer.
On a somewhat related note, is it just me or are the claims of "hackers" to bring the system down, spread viruses, and access credit card and AOL account info (on Valentine's Day) just plain laughable? I've found that the vast majority of folks who call themselves "hackers" are nothing more than teenaged spammers.
The worst they could possibly do is annoy people by scrolling the chat rooms (happens a lot) or putting people's names on mailing lists. The latter is the worse of the two, though, as it would cause their already slow email delivery to get quite a bit worse if the traffic went up enough, as well as constricting the backbone because of increased incoming traffic. An annoyance, but nothing more. 90 percent of "hackers" really crack me up. |
