I moved into a new place in August, and when it came time to getting internet access, I wanted to wait till that first wave of big bills hit before I paid the cost of start up fees, so I grabbed me one of those AOL free 1000 hours disks, and have been casually plotting along with that. Well, today I called to cancel the service, and the woman asked me if I’d tried any of the “Key Words” things. I always just assumed they were simply part of a search engine, like Google, so I said no. So, in hearing that I’m thinking of using a service that’s about $15 cheaper a month, she tells me that by searching a specific word in the key words, I can find a way to get my AOL service for free. She then gives me another key word that can provide me with the same results. She then tells me she’s going to set me up with two more months of free service so I can check these things out and have fun with the key words.
So now, AOL has just given me a total of three free months of service, plus an option to get free service from them almost indefinitely. This happened to my roomate last year. He signed up one of those free 1000 hours thing, and everytime he called to cancel, they just kept giving him more and more months free. He had the damned thing for six months and never paid a dime! You can find these free disks all over the city…hell, I’m suprised AOL hasn’t resorted to just blanketing the city with them from overhead zepalines there are so damned many of them.
So if they keep tossing out free hours to everyone in the nation, how the hell do they manage to make any money themselves? Is it all off of donations from advertisers, or are they slowly stealing a bit of my soul everytime I log on and use that as currency with the devil to help keep them afloat?
Calling AOL under the guise of cancelling your account in order to get 2 free months is the oldest trick in the book! 
How do they make their money? 25 million subscribers at $23 a month per pop.
AOL has probably reached the point that between their ad revenue and the blood they suck from the TimeWarner side of the ledger, they can practically run their Internet user access business as a loss-leader.
You know, there are real FREE services out there!
Try Google and type in Free Internet Services…you will be amazed.
Not only does AOL get monthy payments from nearly all their members, but they also get ad revenue. In addition, those services that have AOL keywords generally pay AOL for the privilege.
They make money? Hmmmm. That’s surprising since they had to buy all the new equipment.
AOL makes most of their money from users fees and advertising. Keywords are, or at least were, a decent source of revenue. When I worked for AOL, IIRC, a keyword went for about $300,000 to start. That probably went down somewhat because I believe that keywords for big companies now link to the companies website instead of using the AOL rainman forms. At the same time just about everyone has a keyword on AOL, just think about how many times you hear someone on TV say “Visit our web site at www .whatever.com or use AOL keyword ‘whatever’”.
Also AOL owns a whole lot of other companies that add to the revenue. IIRC AOL owns the Moviephone company which allows you to buy movie tickets a head of time. (I know they own a movie ticket company because I was there when all the servers that service used melted down when tickets for Star Wars Ep:I went on sale. Thankfully it wasn’t my problem) AOL also owns Netscape, ICQ, and Compuserve.
Slee
I tryed getting free months 3 times (my wife (g/f at the time) canacled her account as I did and we started a new one toghether - we didn’t tell them we were starting a new one) and the other time was when after 1 yr of DSL they raised their rate for their BYOA plan so we cancled.
Ive heard of them offering you more time but I never got it.
I’ve been reading with great interest the financial woes of AOL/Time-Warner. It seems that AOL was counting all those discs they innundate the country with as ASSETS!
Well, technically, they are assets. If you read all the microscopic text, you’ll see that the disc itself and the software contained on that disc is the property of AOL/Time Warner and that they reserve all rights to it. You’re simply granted permission to install it and use it within the limits and scope of the user agreement.
It’s tricky, but technically accurate.
Another chunk of revenue is from all the subscribers out there who think they’ve cancelled their accounts, but are still being billed. Getting out of AOL is as tough as quitting the Mafia.
Be warned.
AOL doesn’t make money (in the sense of turning a profit). They have never made money. No one can imagine how the AOL side of company will ever make money. “Back in the day” of Internet growth, the thinking was “grow at all cost, don’t worry about profits”. AOL bought into that big time. It has no realistic plan for the present realities. If more people realized they can get better Internet service without login pop-ups and less spam for far less money, AOL will dissolve completely.
The shareholders of Time-Warner voting for the merger will go down in history as one of the all time Stupid Financial Moves.
Like www.netzero.net? You are aware that particular ISP is only free for up to 10 hours a month, yes? I’ll bet all the others that turn up in a google search are similar. Great deal for those only interested in having an email address but not much use to a regular Doper.
If they’re making any money, there’s no way it’s because of those discs. They send out zillions of them, but I’d bet 80-85% get tossed. What a waste! They could be pouring the money they spend on that enterprise on improving their product.
It’d take some doing, but I bet it’d be feasible. Log on at an off-peak time when the boards are fast, scan through all forums and open each thread you want to read in a separate window. Don’t read them. When you’ve got everything you want, log off. Shouldn’t take more than a half hour if you’re quick about it, less if you don’t read all the forums.
Then you’re free to compose responses at your leisure. When you’re done with that, log on and submit each one. Obtain a stopwatch and submit each response 65 seconds apart. Check your email and perhaps for updates to interesting threads while you wait. In about another half hour of this you could submit up to 25 or so posts.
Do this every third day and you’d have a reasonable approximation of Doperhood in 10 hours per month. Wouldn’t work for some of the more prolific posters, but for casual (but regular) Doping, I think it’d be worth a shot.
That’s assuming, of course, that the poster in question has nothing they’d like to do online but the SDMB.
Actually, for most of us I suspect it’s pretty feasible.
I’m referring, of course, to the “most of us” who have Web access either through our employers or our schools, and have the freedom to post from those places.
Once you’ve got that as a base, you can use a service like NetZero as a supplement, for evening/weekend access. If you can keep that to 20 minutes a day, average, you’re set.
Back to the OP, I agree that AOL is earning little if any money for AOL Time Warner (and as a consequence, the Time Warner people are back in charge). But along the way, they turned one cost into a revenue source. When this board (or its predecessor, depending on how you define things) was on AOL, they were paying the Chicago Reader to provide them with content. The Straight Dope left AOL because AOL was going to charge the CR for the privilege of having its content on AOL.