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

To: Pancho Villa who wrote (8613)	3/6/1998 10:08:00 PM
From: rhet0ric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 13594

rhetOric: good post. A couple more items the increased competition may also include MSFT which seems to be teaming up with MCIC/WCOM. Also, I still believe the advertising revenue model won't work. Thanks. Yeah, I didn't list all of their competitors, just MCI because they are likely to be the toughest. MCI is the king of marketing, and they know all about how to attack a market leader and steal share. Potentially, though, AOL could face an avalanche of new competition in the next six months or so. When the telcos and cable companies finally wake up, the competition is going to be very intense. Advertising is a double-edge sword. It's a good revenue stream, but it's at the expense of the user experience. So it's a contributing factor to a decrease in AOL subscription. In turn, the fewer subscribers, the less revenue comes in from the ads. Why sit through a bunch of crappy ads when you can use an ISP and not deal with them? It's not like TV, where most channels have ads, and you pay extra for the ones that don't. In this case, AOL users are paying $2+/month more to see ads. I've talked to maybe ten people in the last year who use AOL. All but one of them hates it, and the thing they hate most are the ads (that and the spam, which AOLers get more of). I didn't realize until I used one of their accounts once that you actually have to click through the ads every time you log on just to get to the services. I've personally helped five of those people move to real ISPs, and they were very grateful. rhet0ric