America Online: The Decline of an Empire
Written by Pablo Palatnik on October 16, 2007
Back in the early 90’s or mid 90’s I should say, my life changed. My friends turned me on to this thing called the internet which connected through a phone line. As I always used it at friends’ house, I got my own CD, installed it, and happily paid the $29.95 membership monthly it cost to join.
AOL became the hottest thing around because of its chatting instant messaging features, email, search, and more all in one program. Few people I knew didn’t have AOL if any. The company was on top of the world by mid to late 90’s with MILLIONS of registered users. MarketingVox reports AOL hit its peak in September 2002 with 26.7 million registered users but I think it was more personally, unless it’s been a service where its always had people sign up and sign out. I also remember AOL being the one internet stock that was a craze kind of like Google is now but never reached that price of course. The merger with Time Warner was as big of deal as it got with AOL (and may have been the decline.)
AOL was know for its instant messaging system that came with the software but MSN, Yahoo, and others all came out with its own chatting platforms. AOL also decides to make its instant messaging system a stand alone platform with AIM being a downloadable program on the computer and guess what? It was free and you didn’t need AOL to use it. Bellsouth and other companies came out with dial-up services and then making the big move to DSL, high-speed broadband.
AOL has drastically fallen in the past few years. It now has about 10 million registered users left and laying off thousands. It has been on its way down for several years now and may not be considered an empire, but I thought it was. It is now resolving to be a global ad network which should do well on its own. It does own Advertising.com and several others. AOL is also rumored to buy ValueClick, but that won’t happen until VC gets legal issues taken care of.
The world of the internet moves at such a fast pace now with new and upcoming companies on a daily basis, it’s not easy to survive and maintain a following. AOL did rough it out through some tough times…could this happen to Google?
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