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Technology Stocks : America On-Line: will it survive ...? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (6188)	12/4/1997 10:19:00 PM
From: Investor-ex!	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 13594

irthrifty, Welcome to the "AOL reality page" :-D Is the 65% of internet access # through AOL accurate? Excellent question. This would imply there are only 15 million Internet subscribers (US only). Of these, the little blurb you dug up implies AOL provides access for two-thirds, or 10 million, the number of "subscribers" AOL "claims". I don't know if this implies actual number of paying accounts, one per household, or accounts times average persons per household. In any event, this is pure puffery (some call it total BS) at its finest. A cursory 15 minute search of the Web revealed the following: Here is a link to usage as of 11/25/97, select Demographics and type "uasge": nua.ie intelliquest : 56 million adults online in the US Nov 25 1997: Intelliquest have released a report on Internet usage which reveals that 27 percent of the US population over 16 claim to use the Internet and that 4.9 million adults have come online in the last three months. In addition a further 16 million expressed the intention of going online before the year is out. Here is a source that puts the number of Internet hosts at 19,540,000 nw.com definition: A host is a domain name that has an IP address (A) record associated with it. This would be any computer system connected to the Internet (via full or part-time, direct or dialup connections). ie. nw.com, www.nw.com If you remove AOL's host computer, there are only 19,539,999 other host computers! Here's a similar report showing the growth in host sites graphically: genmagic.com Here's an interesting, "irresponsible" worldwide stats generator. Page down to the "number of people on the Internet on this date" area and type in "December 4, 1997": anamorph.com There would be 118,983,155 people using the Internet. (This represents 1.98 % of the world's population). Finally, here's another interesting blurb for all the banner-ad haters out there, third item down: nua.ie Sydney Morning Herald : Click Through Rate on Ad Banners is dropping Dec 3 1997: At a conference held in Sydney last week, Dr. Marshall Rose of First Virtual a Californian ecommerce company, revealed that less than 2 percent of banner ads placed on frequently visited sites are clicked on by Internet surfers. Despite the fact that "click-through" is decreasing, marketing on the Internet is still considered a more powerful medium than marketing by traditional means and it has the reputation of getting a better response from viewers. Dr. Marshall Rose projected that low click through was because users objected to being brought off the path of whatever they are reading. He suggested that banner ads were counter intuitive as , "the ads try to force the viewer to abandon the reason why they're at that page." P.S., irthrifty, if you really are thrifty, you can 5 hours free web access per month from AT&T each and every month if they are your long distance carrier.

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (6188)	12/4/1997 10:56:00 PM
From: Dan Ross	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

The CEO of Tel-Save must be on crack.....WCOM buying AOL?....Give me a break......that would be the most overpaid amount for any company in the history of M&A....Currently there are approximately 70 million shares short on WCOM due to the MCI deal(arbitrage).....The number would go to 100% + of the float (j.K.) if WCOM bought AOL.... Heck, I would short the hell out of the combined company.... Dan Ross

To: Yogi - Paul who wrote (6188)	12/5/1997 12:34:00 AM
From: jack rand	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 13594

>>Worldcom rumor? Let's see. 3 months ago WCOM sold the CSi division of CSRV to AOL for $100 per sub. The market then promptly valued those subs at $1,000, raising AOL's market cap $2.6 billion. So WCOM will buy back those subs for $900 more than it received. Duh. Obviously, WCOM three months ago didn't think consumer online services is a business it wants to be in. Otherwise, it would have kept CSi and beat the crap out of AOL with discount pricing. Also: Borislow sez AOL sub growth 70% in 12 months. He puts even the most obnoxiously gushing analyst to shame. Should pay more attention to his own stock than to AOL's. Looks like its headed down to $17.