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February 2006
2/23/06
Mobetta Space – A Portal to Where?
2/17/06
2/5/06
Thursday, February 23, 2006
Sisters of the way-side bide their time in quiet peace,
Await their place within the ring of calm;
Still stand to turn in seconds of release,
Await the call they know may never come.
In times of lightness, no intruder dared upon
To jeopardize the course, upset the run;
And all was joy and hands were raised toward the sun
As love in the halls of plenty overrun.
Where does this doorway lead?
Hello once again, loyal and new readers alike! I was honorably pleased with the response to my "Apathy and Tilted Fonts" entry last week. I was rather surprised that the responses include some new friends that I have made in the Biker Bar chats. I fully intended my previous post to be nothing more than chest clearing on my part. It appears that what I believed to be on solitary voice in a large auditorium turned into a sentiment waiting to be echoed in some manner. And for that, I offer my profound thanks!
I did delete a couple of comments, however; former hosts taking a run at me for doing my job correctly when I was employed here. When I attempted to respond privately via e-mail to the people making the inappropriate comments, I found that my e-mail was blocked, and I was unable to send a reply.
I have no problem with negative comments. I'm a human as well, and fully aware of my own fallibilities and shortcomings. However, should you choose to comment in a recreant manner, (ie: not allowing me to reply privately) save both your bandwidth and my time. The comments I can't reply to personally and privately will be given all the respect an inapt comment deserves. None!
That said, it's on to this entry's topic. I had briefly touched upon the erosion of members, and quality of the community since the TWTH (Time-Warner Talking Heads, for you new readers) have had their way with the AOL Division. As I had stated, AOL has lost nearly 10 million members since Steve Case and the rest of the former AOL executives were excommunicated. (Quick math: $25 / month times 10 million… why, that sounds like a quarter of a billion dollars. A MONTH! LOST!) Is it any wonder that the stock price, the value that investors place on a business, has been languishing under $20 per share for the better part of two years? Clearly, since the coup d'etat by the TWTH, AOL has lost value.
In this writer's estimation, there is a clear reason why this is occurring. When looking for a means to make the company more attractive to the investors, the TWTH failed to learn from the history of its newly acquired interactive service, and its unique format and needs, and focused upon an external model. Specifically YAHOO! Don't read anything more into this statement other than the face value. I am a YAHOO! member myself. I play fantasy football every year with several different groups of online friends, (Yes Tazzie, this is a shameless plug for the Animal House) and I also use their instant messaging software to keep in contact with those AOL-phobic friends.
I think it's actually a great service. All the news I need on one page. Shopping, Sports, information about my own hobbies; a fully customizable portal to what I want to find in the Internet. Everything is there, except for one thing: My friends. AKA the reason I remain and AOL member!
YAHOO! came into being as a search engine, morphed into a collection of most common searches, then further evolved into a news page where its users could make the site their way. The reason people returned again and again was they made things their own way. The reason for the continued usage was purely convenience. I came. I saw. I went on my merry way. Much like the newsprint that we all grew up with, YAHOO! is there to get what you need, then package for recycling until the next day's paper arrives.
Ironically, with the evolution of YAHOO!, the visionaries for the site looked to the AOL model to help their company grow. They added community aspects; places and things for Internet users to interact with other users. Why did they do this? The simple concept of MEMBER RETENTION!
Stay with me for a moment while I go on a tangent and bring something that we all do regularly in our lives to illustrate what member retention is: Dining out. Think about the decision process of where you're going to go eat. Excluding the times that you want to splurge, you're looking for a relaxed atmosphere; one in which you can bring your family, friends, co-workers etc. Someplace you can socialize, satisfying that basic of all primal urges we human beings possess.
Take a look at the choices that you have where to satisfy your hunger. In many towns in this country, it is not unusual to find a privately-owned mom and pop restaurant with a local reputation close to a chain restaurant, such as a TGI Fridays. Mom and pop's restaurant has a solid crowd, outstanding food, and potentially with service that reflects the more casual attitude that many smaller restaurants are noted for. Then you look at the Fridays, and you see it's packed!
Have you ever asked yourself why this is? It's simple. TGI Fridays is based upon good, not great food being consistently served by high-energy people who smile and possess a genuine fondness for what they do. They make you feel good. And the company consistently trains their people nation-wide to maintain this level. It doesn't matter if you visit a TGIF in New Jersey or California. You know what you are going to get when you walk in the door. A decent meal served by someone who wants to do what he or she is doing, and you're going to be surrounded by other customers who are enjoying themselves.
And in many ways, this parallels what the AOL growth model was, is likely the reason you are reading my prose, and why YAHOO! adopted the AOL model to sustain their membership base. Simple theory: You keep people in your place, you increase the amount of time you get to advertise products to enhance your profits.
YAHOO! is what the internet industry refers to as a portal. The doorway for an individual to find what they need and get on their way. Much like the TGIF example I used, it's the volume of people visiting finding what they need presented in a friendly and customizable manner that makes people return. And the stock value nearly double than that of Time-Warner stock. But the bottom line is that YAHOO! added their community after the fact; it was not their primary focus, and is not currently.
All in all, it seems like the notion the TWTH using the YAHOO! model is a sound business plan. It reduces costs in that it's cheaper to buy news than to pay someone to write about it, and with community being an ancillary item, less money is spent maintaining those assets.
However, AOL is not YAHOO! "America On Line." Even the name that Steve Case chose back in the mid-1980s for this service screams the scope and philosophy of this company. Get America online. America: the melting pot of the world, the combination and mixture of every culture imaginable. The "so ugly it's cute" affectionate mutt you brought home from the pet store when you went shopping for a pure-bred dog. That's us!
Case was smart enough to realize that we as social beings, would be more attracted to situations that put us on contact with other like-minded people than simply providing just another boring page on the growing Internet. He had software developed to make is fledgling service unique. The whole company was focus on one goal: complete customer satisfaction. They knew, if the customers were kept satisfied, half the work of retaining the member base would be done by the members themselves.
The TWTH are placing far too much reliance upon that last idea, that the members themselves will retain the member base. While many current members of AOL are here solely to maintain the friendships they created here, more and more are feeling that the value of their hard earned dollars is greater than the satisfaction they are receiving by keeping AOL.
It is rare that one can go into a chat room or onto a message board and not find people being harassed, automated programs running hacked accounts and posting ads to x-rated content that is not removed in a timely manner, people creating cloned names (substituting lower case "ls" for upper case "Is" in screen name, for instance) to taunt both other members into believing a friendly screen name has gone bad and other forms of disruption.
While the oft-trumpeted Terms of Service clearly state each of the above examples of member behavior are reasons for a potential account cancellation, the members causing the disruptions are repeatedly reported, yet no action is taken against the member. Very poor customer service at the least, gang. That's 10 million members and three billion dollars a year you've lost dear TWTH!
Especially with the emphasis upon turning AOL into a YAHOO!-like portal, this neglect of the 24 million or so of us who remain AOL members will only accelerate the member drain we are currently witnessing. One aspect of the YAHOO! community assets is most of them require some form of membership in each area, were at least one person has control of who is allowed to partake in the discussions.
At AOL, we PAY to become part of all aspects of the service. The difference being on AOL, there are far greater opportunities for an individual to meet new people due to the public nature of the service. You've already joined in one large community. Failure on the TWTH part to maintain this aspect is purely to blame for the member drain.
It's not that the average Internet user has grown more sophisticated, as I have heard coming down from the ivory bunny tower since 2003. The sophisticated Internet user has NEVER been an AOL member. That doesn't make a difference in AOL's membership at all, no matter what the countless scores of mall surveys have told you.
The fact is that many members of AOL do not have the desire nor the need to become more sophisticated in their computer skills. This is interactive television: people want to turn on their PCs, log on, and find entertainment. If there's a problem with their computer they can't fix, there are enough geeky kids down the street or grown up geeks, like myself, who are willing to lend a hand to correct others' problems. (There we go, back to that community thing again.)
Should this plan come to fruition, the end result will be a lose situation. Who will lose? You will! I will. The stockholders will. So the TWTH succeed in turning AOL into "Yet Another Humdrum Online Outlet" the type of portal AOL will become is evident to all but the people making the decisions. It will merely be the doorway to the end of AOL.
Once again, thank you for reading.
-- Mo
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Mobetta Space – A Portal to Where?
Frustrated | Led Zeppelin - Carouselambra
Await their place within the ring of calm;
Still stand to turn in seconds of release,
Await the call they know may never come.
In times of lightness, no intruder dared upon
To jeopardize the course, upset the run;
And all was joy and hands were raised toward the sun
As love in the halls of plenty overrun.
Where does this doorway lead?
Hello once again, loyal and new readers alike! I was honorably pleased with the response to my "Apathy and Tilted Fonts" entry last week. I was rather surprised that the responses include some new friends that I have made in the Biker Bar chats. I fully intended my previous post to be nothing more than chest clearing on my part. It appears that what I believed to be on solitary voice in a large auditorium turned into a sentiment waiting to be echoed in some manner. And for that, I offer my profound thanks!
I did delete a couple of comments, however; former hosts taking a run at me for doing my job correctly when I was employed here. When I attempted to respond privately via e-mail to the people making the inappropriate comments, I found that my e-mail was blocked, and I was unable to send a reply.
I have no problem with negative comments. I'm a human as well, and fully aware of my own fallibilities and shortcomings. However, should you choose to comment in a recreant manner, (ie: not allowing me to reply privately) save both your bandwidth and my time. The comments I can't reply to personally and privately will be given all the respect an inapt comment deserves. None!
That said, it's on to this entry's topic. I had briefly touched upon the erosion of members, and quality of the community since the TWTH (Time-Warner Talking Heads, for you new readers) have had their way with the AOL Division. As I had stated, AOL has lost nearly 10 million members since Steve Case and the rest of the former AOL executives were excommunicated. (Quick math: $25 / month times 10 million… why, that sounds like a quarter of a billion dollars. A MONTH! LOST!) Is it any wonder that the stock price, the value that investors place on a business, has been languishing under $20 per share for the better part of two years? Clearly, since the coup d'etat by the TWTH, AOL has lost value.
In this writer's estimation, there is a clear reason why this is occurring. When looking for a means to make the company more attractive to the investors, the TWTH failed to learn from the history of its newly acquired interactive service, and its unique format and needs, and focused upon an external model. Specifically YAHOO! Don't read anything more into this statement other than the face value. I am a YAHOO! member myself. I play fantasy football every year with several different groups of online friends, (Yes Tazzie, this is a shameless plug for the Animal House) and I also use their instant messaging software to keep in contact with those AOL-phobic friends.
I think it's actually a great service. All the news I need on one page. Shopping, Sports, information about my own hobbies; a fully customizable portal to what I want to find in the Internet. Everything is there, except for one thing: My friends. AKA the reason I remain and AOL member!
YAHOO! came into being as a search engine, morphed into a collection of most common searches, then further evolved into a news page where its users could make the site their way. The reason people returned again and again was they made things their own way. The reason for the continued usage was purely convenience. I came. I saw. I went on my merry way. Much like the newsprint that we all grew up with, YAHOO! is there to get what you need, then package for recycling until the next day's paper arrives.
Ironically, with the evolution of YAHOO!, the visionaries for the site looked to the AOL model to help their company grow. They added community aspects; places and things for Internet users to interact with other users. Why did they do this? The simple concept of MEMBER RETENTION!
Stay with me for a moment while I go on a tangent and bring something that we all do regularly in our lives to illustrate what member retention is: Dining out. Think about the decision process of where you're going to go eat. Excluding the times that you want to splurge, you're looking for a relaxed atmosphere; one in which you can bring your family, friends, co-workers etc. Someplace you can socialize, satisfying that basic of all primal urges we human beings possess.
Take a look at the choices that you have where to satisfy your hunger. In many towns in this country, it is not unusual to find a privately-owned mom and pop restaurant with a local reputation close to a chain restaurant, such as a TGI Fridays. Mom and pop's restaurant has a solid crowd, outstanding food, and potentially with service that reflects the more casual attitude that many smaller restaurants are noted for. Then you look at the Fridays, and you see it's packed!
Have you ever asked yourself why this is? It's simple. TGI Fridays is based upon good, not great food being consistently served by high-energy people who smile and possess a genuine fondness for what they do. They make you feel good. And the company consistently trains their people nation-wide to maintain this level. It doesn't matter if you visit a TGIF in New Jersey or California. You know what you are going to get when you walk in the door. A decent meal served by someone who wants to do what he or she is doing, and you're going to be surrounded by other customers who are enjoying themselves.
And in many ways, this parallels what the AOL growth model was, is likely the reason you are reading my prose, and why YAHOO! adopted the AOL model to sustain their membership base. Simple theory: You keep people in your place, you increase the amount of time you get to advertise products to enhance your profits.
YAHOO! is what the internet industry refers to as a portal. The doorway for an individual to find what they need and get on their way. Much like the TGIF example I used, it's the volume of people visiting finding what they need presented in a friendly and customizable manner that makes people return. And the stock value nearly double than that of Time-Warner stock. But the bottom line is that YAHOO! added their community after the fact; it was not their primary focus, and is not currently.
All in all, it seems like the notion the TWTH using the YAHOO! model is a sound business plan. It reduces costs in that it's cheaper to buy news than to pay someone to write about it, and with community being an ancillary item, less money is spent maintaining those assets.
However, AOL is not YAHOO! "America On Line." Even the name that Steve Case chose back in the mid-1980s for this service screams the scope and philosophy of this company. Get America online. America: the melting pot of the world, the combination and mixture of every culture imaginable. The "so ugly it's cute" affectionate mutt you brought home from the pet store when you went shopping for a pure-bred dog. That's us!
Case was smart enough to realize that we as social beings, would be more attracted to situations that put us on contact with other like-minded people than simply providing just another boring page on the growing Internet. He had software developed to make is fledgling service unique. The whole company was focus on one goal: complete customer satisfaction. They knew, if the customers were kept satisfied, half the work of retaining the member base would be done by the members themselves.
The TWTH are placing far too much reliance upon that last idea, that the members themselves will retain the member base. While many current members of AOL are here solely to maintain the friendships they created here, more and more are feeling that the value of their hard earned dollars is greater than the satisfaction they are receiving by keeping AOL.
It is rare that one can go into a chat room or onto a message board and not find people being harassed, automated programs running hacked accounts and posting ads to x-rated content that is not removed in a timely manner, people creating cloned names (substituting lower case "ls" for upper case "Is" in screen name, for instance) to taunt both other members into believing a friendly screen name has gone bad and other forms of disruption.
While the oft-trumpeted Terms of Service clearly state each of the above examples of member behavior are reasons for a potential account cancellation, the members causing the disruptions are repeatedly reported, yet no action is taken against the member. Very poor customer service at the least, gang. That's 10 million members and three billion dollars a year you've lost dear TWTH!
Especially with the emphasis upon turning AOL into a YAHOO!-like portal, this neglect of the 24 million or so of us who remain AOL members will only accelerate the member drain we are currently witnessing. One aspect of the YAHOO! community assets is most of them require some form of membership in each area, were at least one person has control of who is allowed to partake in the discussions.
At AOL, we PAY to become part of all aspects of the service. The difference being on AOL, there are far greater opportunities for an individual to meet new people due to the public nature of the service. You've already joined in one large community. Failure on the TWTH part to maintain this aspect is purely to blame for the member drain.
It's not that the average Internet user has grown more sophisticated, as I have heard coming down from the ivory bunny tower since 2003. The sophisticated Internet user has NEVER been an AOL member. That doesn't make a difference in AOL's membership at all, no matter what the countless scores of mall surveys have told you.
The fact is that many members of AOL do not have the desire nor the need to become more sophisticated in their computer skills. This is interactive television: people want to turn on their PCs, log on, and find entertainment. If there's a problem with their computer they can't fix, there are enough geeky kids down the street or grown up geeks, like myself, who are willing to lend a hand to correct others' problems. (There we go, back to that community thing again.)
Should this plan come to fruition, the end result will be a lose situation. Who will lose? You will! I will. The stockholders will. So the TWTH succeed in turning AOL into "Yet Another Humdrum Online Outlet" the type of portal AOL will become is evident to all but the people making the decisions. It will merely be the doorway to the end of AOL.
Once again, thank you for reading.
-- Mo
ifoundforester at 10:52:00 PM EST Blog about this entry |
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This entry has 4 comments: (Add your own)
-
Dear Mo - Once again a well written and informative article. I, as you know, am one of the most unsophisticated computer users in the world. I can get what I want via the internet on my Comcast Home Page, and quite frankly, the only reason I still have AOL is because of the chat room and the wonderful people, like yourself, whom I have met there. When those friendships are disrupted by others who do not seem to possess basic manners in the art of treating people with respect and dignity, then there will no longer be a need for me to spend $25 a month for the AOL service. I truly hope these past two articles you have written will not fall upon deaf ears. Thank you for the information and wonderful prose. Keep up the good work. Paul
-
I love it! Mo, you keep on tellin it like it is .. Maybe one of those TWTHs will see your writings and "buy a clue."
-
Great article Mo- and right on too!!!
3/12/06 3:44 AM