Legal Commentary

Can AOL Make a Comeback?

By Jeralyn

The New York Times reports AOL, in its spinoff from its "disasterous" acquisition by Time Warner, is making significant changes and planning for a comeback.

Could it work? I'm one the few who still use AOL for e-mail. I started in 1996 and old habits die hard. While I also use gmail and prefer that for my law practice, I think AOL has some advantages for personal and blog-related e-mail. I'm not talking about the internet version but the version you install on your computer. (You can download it from their home page.) The installed version loads quicker and requires fewer clicks for mass actions -- like deleting mail with one click, without having to click a checkbox next to the items before you delete it.

One of AOL's new features is, get this, reduced ads on its site. [More...]

pulling back some ads -- a step that reduced clutter on AOL pages and made them load faster -- showed that consumers were the company's first priority, given that the move could sacrifice some revenue.

''We are on a long journey and sometimes you do have to make short-term trade-offs for that long-term gain,'' said AOL's new head of advertising, Jeff Levick.

I think that's a big deal. I immediately log off a news site when I click on an article and an ad comes up requiring me to click "skip this ad and go directly to article." I also won't return to sites that have audio clips that are set to play automatically and you have to search for the mute button while it blares through the speakers.

In the old days (five years ago)it was easy enough to say "just delete it" about unwanted mail and ads. But when you're online all day, checking dozens of news sites and getting 300 plus emails a day, every click adds up and combined, they are a big and wasted expenditure of time.

I've also noticed that AOL news has gotten better and they do a good job of presenting the top five or so stories in all categories without having them take up half a page. They also use images effectively and have a layout that mostly lets you take in what's going on in one glance without having to move your eyes left and right or up and down. Their mass spam deletion is also top notch (although gmail is also excellent at this.)

I hope AOL makes it. I could probably come up with a dozen more reasons why and a dozen suggestions for them going forward, but they might have to make me their 7,001th employee to get me to actually sit down and do it.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 20, 2009 (boomark / email).