AOL Reversal: Free in UK

from the soon-to-be-free-everywhere? dept

AOL has struggled with how to combat the free ISPs in the UK, cutting prices in May, and now acceding to free service. The UK market is a bit different (see my earlier comments here), so AOL faces a dilemma: charge if you think your "experience" or brand is worth a premium to the free ISPs, or go free and offer better "experience" or brand at same price. Again, until we get an HTML sarcasm tag, I'll just use double-quotes, but given the revenue AOL gets from prostituting their users eyeballs, it is amazing to me that they can continue to charge money for their service here in the US. In part, their target customer is willing to pay for the ease of initiation that AOL can provide, but message to AOL users: you shouldn't have to pay for the advertizing barrage you endure. Try NetZero to get the same barrage for free or spend your $20/mo with Minspring, Earthlink, etc.