This is not in general questions as it has no definitive answer.
I got one of them free AOL discs in a store in October.
Each time I call to cancel they give me 2 more months free.
I knew my free was going to expire in May but didn’t know when.
So today my fathers phone bill came with charges on it($28).
I signed up by using our home phone as we have no credit.
So I called AOL.
They said they would cancel the charges, and give me 2 more months.
What are they getting out of this?
I’ve told them I have NO income and may never.
Go figure.
What are they getting out of it? A subscriber. Perhaps some day you’ll start paying for it, perhaps not, but either way AOL can count you as a subscriber when setting advertising rates.
AOL (Time-Warner) has two things to worry about in its quarterly reports. The first, of course, is revenue and the second is number of subscribers.
The second one has been the most important one to a lot of analysts over the years. By tracking subscribers, you get a feel as to how the company is going to do in the future. Flat or decreasing subscriber base is Not Good. That’s pretty much what is happening now.
When AOL’s future looks bad, TW stock goes down even more. Execs only get $10 million dollar bonuses instead of $20M. So they Do Whatever It Takes to inflate their subscriber count. (They have a long history of inflating that number.)
Note that since their paid rate is so high*, a few hundred thousand non-payers don’t make too much difference to the bottom line.
Remember, on Wall Street, everybody frets over the details of todays numbers in order to guess how to make money on a stock tomorrow. A company can have a record quarter and the stock tanks since analysts found a little weakness in projections on page 285.
*If you know anything about diapup ISPs, you can get a much better (actually a true) ISP for $10 less.
I had to resort to carrying on like a crazy person with these people. It didn’t faze them in the least! I kept getting the next manager, and the next manager… I guess they finally ran out of managers.
The eight-hundredth time they called me after I had successfully canceled the service to ask me AGAIN why I had canceled and try to lure me back AGAIN, I told them that I was Amish.
This was apparently a crazy enough answer that they decided to leave me alone.
I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ve been banned for life from AOL for a comment my teen-age son made in a chat room…it was so mild I couldn’t even yell at him about it, but someone in the chat room reported him and I am now “Banned For Life”. They keep sending me free discs, and every once in a while I call in to try and subscribe, and then they pull up my file and say, oh, no, we don’t want your money.
So say something stupid in a chat with a friend, have them report you and all will be well!
Meh. I was “banned for life” too. Heck, I was even set up for banning by an actual salaried AOL employee (not even a volunteer “Guide”) who filed false reports while I was part of a forum staff. All I had to do was use a different credit card and I was golden, and eventually I ended up as a “valued community leader” and let me tell you, I cherish the free gold-embossed leatherette CD holder they sent me.
I told them I was moving to a different country and they still cajoled me into taking another month free. Then when they sent a notice in the mail, I faxed it back to them and demanded permanent cancellation. I haven’t received any more calls.
He was in a chat room, and one person (someone he did not know in real life) that he had been chatting with over the course of a few weeks was ignoring him but talking about him. My son was trying to get the kid to answer, and he said, “I’ll kill you if you don’t answer” in frustration after this person refused to discuss why he was ignoring my son. The kid then decided that if he reported my son, he could get him kicked out of the chat room.
Stupid comment, especially since it took place a few months after Columbine. That was the reason AOL gave me, when I tried to reason with them. I said, "come on, you’ve never told someone in frustration, I’ll kill you if you don’t (insert banal action like ‘stop making that noise’, “pick up that mess’)?” AOL said, “due to the events at Columbine, we have to take every death threat seriously, no matter how common the phrase might be.”
No amount of appealing to their sense of reason and rationality helped. I lost all my stored emails, which was a pain because I hadn’t written down some of the addresses from old friends coming in for a reunion.
Yeah, my brother was just telling me about this kind of thing. He called to cancel, they whined, he told them he was going on vacation for a month, was moving into just a hotel room supplied by the Army for maybe 3 months after that, and wouldn’t have any way to use their service during that time.
Vanilla, keep an eye on your phone bill. It’s just like AOL to tell you they’re giving you free time and then try to charge you. I had it happen to me a few times before I finally got them to leave me alone.
I told them their application had screwed up my OS and made my mouse not work among other things, and that I’d spent several hours uninstalling and untangling their crappy software so I could use my computer again. The friendly phonecritter apologized and cancelled me immediately, and they have not attempted in any way to contact me to re-enable the service.
As to why I turned it on in the first place, that’s a different story.
