AOL Advertising On the Way
Thursday, January 18, 2007
As David Kaplan so appropriately titles his article, so does AOL seem to finally come into their own - or at least try to. For years, AOL members [ex, anti, and current] complained over the induntation of, some would say, excessive advertising.
Having a free ISP such as NetZero, where one would sign up for free and have free internet access, advertisements in exchange could be understood. Though not charging, the entire time of your online experience would be met with having a large and thick band stretch the horizontal top quarter of your monitor. I think that would be a fair exchange.
But to pay anywhere from $19.95 to $21.95 per month and to still have the ads bombard the one's shelling out that kind of cash, I may have a bone to pick. Well, it seems AOL's finally recognizing themselves for what they are.
Here's a snippet of David Kaplan's article today entitled, "AOL Looks To Sell Advertising, Not Internet Access These Days."
After being written off by industry observers for much of the past few years, AOL appears to have found its true calling: selling online advertising. As AOL continues to press its $900 million bid for TradeDoubler, the Swedish online marketing firm, the FT notes that the internet company has finally become a positive factor for Time Warner and its shareholders. (...)
Past to Current Related Articles:
- June 24, 2004: AOL to buy Advertising.com for $435 Million
- May 18, 2006: AOL Aquires Broadband Ad Company Lightningcast
Technorati: aol, AOL, Time Warner, Google, antiaol, anti-aol, advertising, Advertising
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AOL Users and Surfing Drunk
Saturday, January 06, 2007
AOL customers, often lay at the mercy of the ridiculing internet users at large - at least back in the mid to late 90's. People making fun of the AOL user was funny at first. But then it seemed to have gotten old - at least for me and many of my friends.
A new trend had begun developing - a true concern for the emotional and mental status of the average AOL user. Moderating our low traffic email list, we'd often have several AOL members [yes, they were always AOL members] emailing to the list to cancel their email subscription, "TAKE ME OFF THIS LIST YOU BASTARD!" or "QUIT EMAILING ME! I DON'T KNOW U!" Nevermind that the link at the bottom had in big shiny words: "UNSUBSCRIBE" and of course, along with the link to email to UNSUBSCRIBE.
Another instance of troubling AOL status on this same list would be the weekly email to every member, "WHAT IS THIS? WHY ARE YOU TELLING ME THIS?" or "WHO R U?" from different members. So one of the moderators would email back [to the entire list] and relate in a diplomatic fashion how it was that one day they signed up for this list. Often, one of the moderators would go far beyond duty and would pull the date she signed up and slowly explain that she had to have signed up because our list server requires it AND confirmation.
Here were other experiences of AOL members as reported by various sources - in my dealings with troubling AOL customer service, AOL users, and AOL Tech Support, as well as people who contacted me with their problems and concerns over AOL. AOL users would think or do any of the following:
- Think their screenname was their email address.
- Think that AOL was the internet.
- Find it acceptable that AOL itself would inundate them with ads.
- Have a hard time cancelling AOL in the first place.
- Getting billed even when they had cancelled AOL.
- Double billing while stile on AOL.
- Sluggish computers that were fine pre-installation of AOL.
- Double and sometimes triple installations of AOL [one the same machine].
- AOL Tech's stand-by advice of checking the modem strings.
- AOL Tech's thinking they were techs in the first place.
Yes, it was a wonder that AOL users got around at all. I wonder if it's still the same in 2007. Here's a page that has some anecdotes of life with AOL. http://www.thehumorarchives.com/joke/Diary_of_an_AOL_user
Okay. Are these true instances of various AOL users? I think one would have to have had first hand experience in dealing with the AOL user community in order to believe that those stories are true to life - at least in theory. Let me go on and share my own true experiences and those of the people around me. For interesting instances with AOL Tech Support [sic] just point your browser here: http://www.aol-icq.net/old_archives/aoltech.html.
In my opinion, AOL served no one by making it easy for people to "plug and surf" and we have to face it that Darwan's whole theory of evolution was swiped clean with the arrival of AOL's popularity onto the scene. We have to first acknowledge that no, not everyone deserves or even should be on the internet.
Entire intranets have been destroyed due to the careless downloads of the person who thinks he is an administrator because he operates from the server but didn't have the where-with-all to make daily back-ups. I have cleaned up home systems that have had over 6000 variations of trojans, viruses, and worms [and AOL]. I have gone to extreme measures to protect these systems from the careless operation of the owners of these systems but it always seemed that when AOL was involved, if they decided to remain with AOL, often it was a waste of time.
If one cannot figure out how to get on the internet without AOL, perhaps one should not be on the internet. After all, AOL doesn't care if you're dumbed-down to the internet. It was always their job to inundate you with enough marketing that they would get fat off your wallet. AOL with a bottlenecking of the internet, it's 7:30pm on a Friday night and you can't get to your favorite www.aol-icq.net domain? Oh ghastly!
Next thing you know, people will no longer need a license to drive drunk.
Technorati: aol, noobs, newbies, AOL members, antiaol, anti-aol, ISP, aol sux, aol sucks, internet license, online, offline, aolicq, internet, surfing drunk, internet surfing
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AOL Fraud Case Nears an End
Friday, January 05, 2007
Prosecution rests in long-running fraud case against two former AOL executives and another from PurchasePro, report says.
As reported at CNNmoney.com today, January 5, 2007, federal prosecutors concluded their case on Thursday against two former AOL executives, another published report cites. The case, that began in October of 2006 is reportedly by the Washington Post, as one of the longest ever criminal trials to be held in the U.S. District Court of Alexandria, VA. Time Warner owns AOL, as most people already know. But probably not as well known, is that Time Warner also owns CNNmoney.com.
CNNMoney.com's continued report:
More than three dozen government witnesses testified about complex accounting tricks that were allegedly done by the defendants dating back to early 2001, soon after the so-called bursting of the Internet bubble.
The paper reports testimony in the case was that managers at AOL struggled to show revenue and advertising gains by making questionable deals with dot-com business partners in which no revenue changed hands.
AOL is a unit of Time Warner (Charts), which also owns CNNMoney.com.
Time Warner agreed to pay more than $500 million to settle joint civil and criminal charges against the company two years ago.
There are two remaining former AOL executives facing charges in the case, according to the report: business affairs executive Kent Wakeford and Netbusiness unit vice president John Tuli. In addition, Christopher Benyo, a former employee of the dot.com company PurchasePro, is also a defendant, according to the report.
But PurchasePro founder Charles "Junior" Johnson, who was originally a defendant as well, was separated from the case and had his trial declared a mistrial for undisclosed reasons, the paper reports. Federal prosecutors intend to retry him.
In addition, the paper reports that two former AOL officials who led the business-affairs operation, David Colburn and Eric Keller, had their names come up regularly in testimony and had once had been the focus of government investigation. But charges were never filed against them and the five-year statute of limitations against them expired early last year.
The Post reports that defense lawyers could wrap up their case in the next several days, and that none have indicated they will testify in the case.
Click here for the article at CNNmoney.com
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New!
July 13 2006
This site and blog are not necessarily against AOL. It's a critique of some of the methods AOL uses or some may say abuses toward it's customers and/or the internet at large.
Visiting Dear AOL, for example, will reveal a petition that some are signing in order to stop AOL from sending allowed spam to your AOL email-box.
Are you being threatened with trademark infringement? Have you been ordered to transfer your domain name over? Here are some resources:
Electronic Frontier Foundation
Chilling Effects Clearinghouse
About This Blog
This blog was formed after AOL™ or America Online ™ - an online service provider - sent a threatening notice to the Registrar of the domain name www.aol-icq.net telling them to transfer it to AOL. The notice made assertions of copyright infringement of the name and even went so far as to assert their ownership of the once non-AOL controlled name ICQ™. At first blush, this may seem not so unreasonable. However. The former owner of www.aol-icq.com, acquired circa 1998 for the purpose of helping AOL members use ICQ while on AOL, is the same owner of www.aol-icq.net, which was acquired in 2002 when an accidental missing of the deadline left it open for AOL to register it.
Therefore, does this latest AOL threat sound like Reverse Domain Name Hijacking?
