I don't know...this sounds apocryphal. I've seen the occasional AOL email address but I've haven't seen anyone claim they use AOL for internet in years.
There are far more than "occasional" AOL email addresses...
I just checked mailing list stats for our largest UK customer - where AOL never reached penetration anywhere near the US - and while AOL is by no means huge, they're the fourth largest e-mail provider represented on their list, after Hotmail (which out-distances everyone by a wide margin in the UK) and Gmail / Yahoo (which one is in second depends on whether you count Yahoo's various partnerships - they provide e-mail and other content services for some major ISPs).
Techies in particular tends to get very surprised when they realize that the entire world don't use Gmail... (gmail accounts for about 9%-10% of the subscribers on that list, compared to about 35% for Hotmail...)
This is a restaurant chain that covers a pretty good cross section of the UK, with a list of near a million users.
Sort of. AOL Broadband is actually a brand operated by Talk Talk. They acquired AOL UK excluding the content business back in 2006.
You're right that probably does account for a lot of AOL addresses, though. But the size of Talk Talk as a whole (don't know the breakdown between the Talk Talk brand and AOL brand for their ADSL) is too small to account for even a majority of the AOL addresses, and there are disproportionally many AOL addresses vs. market share compared to other operators like BT.
People want offers. We're in the process of helping them clean up their mailing list at the moment, and the open rate is rapidly getting to the 30% range for ordinary offer e-mails and coupons, and much more for "special" offers (like 50% off vouchers).
Especially since the financial crisis, people have been very budget conscious, and a lot of people are on these mailinglists to get offers for lunch etc.
We actually have a nice timeline of the crisis: When Lehmans toppled, bookings at the restaurants of our clients near their building shot through the roof. And looking back at bounce stats, we can tell which firms had large layoffs when, as we suddenly had 30% of addresses at one city firm bounce, 50% of another, and so on.
My mom. She was still paying for AOL until about a year ago, despite them having broadband since 2000. She thought it was her internet. I finally convinced her to start using gmail, but I think she still pays for AOL. Also, now she thinks google is her internet.
My dad as well. I have set him up accounts a couple of different times and tried forcing use by only email the gmail address. Yet every time I get an email from him, its from that flipping AOL account.
Yet, I install Opera four years ago and come home to find its become his default browser and he knows the hotkeys better than I do. Go figure...
They don't, but they're not the type to check their bills either. I did collections in college for AT&T Consumer Lease phones. These people have been paying to rent their phones (6-20 dollars a MONTH), still, 20-30 years after the breakup of their monopoly. Their kids had been paying the bills for them as their parents were incapacitated. It was pretty terrible.
My parents up until 2010 did not switch to a high-speed ISP and continued to use AOL dialup until 2008, which is when they switched to NetZero which was marginally faster but far cheaper.
In some ways, perhaps dial-up is a better proposition than DSL or cable due to its slowness. It does discourage distraction and waste of time on the net, and since I don't browse YouTube and use
links2 -g
to browse the web, perhaps it isn't such a bad idea. Although, I would have to go to Starbucks whenever I wanted to download a new Linux distro. ;)
As for email, I still do use an AOL email address. I use it for Facebook and AIM, but I use my Hotmail (now "Outlook") for personal email and inquiries.
But AIM. Can't live without it.
If AOL calls it quits on AIM, I will probably shed a few tears. There is nothing like AIM left. Facebook is locked-down and doesn't support buddy lists, MSN is dead, Skype is proprietary and forces you to use its own client, and nobody I know has a Google Talk account and my IM client doesn't support it, even though I've tried to set it up as a Jabber/XMPP account.
In addition to the practical merits you've listed, nothing else sips bandwidth quite like AIM. Despite being the champion of open-source communication, XMPP is fairly awful on low-bandwidth, high-latency links. AIM, partially as a product of the era in which it was engineered, doesn't care a bit.
On the contrary I found the internet more addictive on dial up. You waited so long for a webpage to load that the reward/payoff of finally getting what you wanted made you want to do it again. Along came broadband and an hours worth of browsing probably dropped to 15 minutes. Especially if you're looking for something very specific that involves lots of searching and narrowing your search based on information from other results.
Among my social group, everyone now uses Facebook Chat, iMessages, or Google Talk. I think I only have one or two people still on AIM. I think the problem with AIM is the lack of a default mobile client. Everyone's phone has Facebook installed, or comes with either iMessages or Google Talk. Nobody bothers to install an AIM client (I'm not even sure if there's an official one, and if it supports Push notifications)
That's really interesting, our social networks are very different: Basically no one I know uses AIM anymore (In highschool it was the only thing) but as I started playing games with others I used MSN, QQ, ICQ, IIRC, but now most of my friends are college grads and have gmail accounts so gchat/gtalk is it. It's kind of sad to log into AIM and no one be there, it's like a graveyard.
My dad still pays despite having Comcast since forever. He thinks he'll lose his email he's had forever if he cancels. I've tried many times to convince him otherwise but.. some people just don't get technology and the Internet.
Some data for fun. I run programming related mailing lists, all formed since 2009. I have 113k-ish subscribers and just checked and have 105 @aol.com subscribers.. so a whole 0.09% in that highly technical demographic.
I'm guessing you're a smart person and have never done tech support for cable or dsl? Every other call is from some granny who can't check her AOL email because the cable is out.
Seriously, there are massive swaths of people out there who pay for high speed internet _and_ AOL because they just don't know any better.
No, I don't do that job anymore (yay!). And no, I never explained to any of those people they are being stupid.
