If you are like me you first heard of AOL when you would get their CDs in the mail for their dial-up service. Well it has been quite a while since AOL has sent those out or we have even thought about dial-up, but surprisingly its legacy dial-up subscription business is still generating a big portion of its sales and most of its profits.
At the end of June AOL still had 2.3 million subscribers, paying an average of $20.86 per month as detailed in their second-quarter earnings presentation. While most people have moved on to faster broadband the dial-up business has stabilized in the past few years. It is only down 245,000 from the same time last year and 84,000 from the end of the first quarter. A decade ago the number was at 21 million!
AOL’s “Membership Group”, which includes the dial-up access group generated about one-third of the company’s $607 million in sales last quarter. Expect the number of subscribers to keep on decreasing as wireless access becomes more popular. It is still pretty astonishing that 2.3 million people are on dial-up!
Source: Quartz | News Archive
