AOL's Free CD Campaign Was Anything But Cheap
- Thread starter vansau
- Start date
Maybe there new marketing campaign should be covertly making their service even discernably competant, and "leak" that an AOL connection is actually worth the money and isn't an unreliable, restrictive, pathetic bandwidth, slow scam anymore. My parents set up our internet connection 6 years ago (I spent 6 prior trying to get it) and they chose AOL based on the fact my grandparents had it. It was then bought by Carphone Warehouse and became inexplicably awful in every respect. Very rarely is it fast enough to stream a video on youtube at the lowest resolution without a 10 second per second of video, wait.
I preferred it when they sent out the venerable and ancient 3.5" disks in the beginning. I can't tell you the number of uses I got out of those for extra backups, sneaker net trading of various things found on BBSes, boot disks, you name it. They probably weren't the highest quality of media, but they were free.
The main problem with this AOL marketing campaign was that when people had signed up to a 12 month contract, they invariably had 12 months of internet access to find a company that didn't suck donkey balls. 12 months to find out that there was a whole world of internet that wasn't slow with frequent disconnects, but in fact, reliable, enjoyable, fast and fun.
I'm speaking of AOL UK who, to be fair, WERE unbelievably shit, but then sold their UK arm to Carphone Whorehouse and actually managed to get worse.
I had to lie to my own parents to get them to let go of AOL, despite it being a bloody awful service, telling them that they'd get to keep their AOL email address (which is now spamming her new address, amusingly.) Even that wasn't enough, it was a high pressure sales call from an indian call centre that made my dad lose his rag, where they effectively told him that if he didn't sign up on the spot for a new 24 month contract he'd be cut off that day.
Hell, it might even have been a scam call and not from AOL, I don't care, I just know I've got my parents away from 'up to 1mb broadband' for £18 a month, to nearer 8mb from BE for £7.50, and it's far more reliable and doesn't come with a disc full of free shite to clog up their pc.
I'm speaking of AOL UK who, to be fair, WERE unbelievably shit, but then sold their UK arm to Carphone Whorehouse and actually managed to get worse.
I had to lie to my own parents to get them to let go of AOL, despite it being a bloody awful service, telling them that they'd get to keep their AOL email address (which is now spamming her new address, amusingly.) Even that wasn't enough, it was a high pressure sales call from an indian call centre that made my dad lose his rag, where they effectively told him that if he didn't sign up on the spot for a new 24 month contract he'd be cut off that day.
Hell, it might even have been a scam call and not from AOL, I don't care, I just know I've got my parents away from 'up to 1mb broadband' for £18 a month, to nearer 8mb from BE for £7.50, and it's far more reliable and doesn't come with a disc full of free shite to clog up their pc.
First thing I thought of, too. The CDs were just annoying to have to throw out, but getting free floppies in the mail every few weeks was awesome. Or being That Guy who'd go into a store and grab several of the ones they were giving out for free by the door/registers...or like some less subtle people I knew, swiping the entire display and getting what amounted to a free case of disks. Hard to argue with 60MB of free disk space when you only have a 40MB hard drive to begin with. Heh.megs1120 said:
Ah to live in those simple and bountiful times again, when people could complain about too much free Internet.
Snail Mail Spam. I remember reading about one guy who saved hundreds of disks and then mailed them back.
None.danpascooch said:
They're actually pretty saavy, they just didn't understand that AOL was worthless.
Send 'em to the local community college for Econ 101. After a quick course in economics they'll trade their platitude for a chant of "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (or TANSTAAFL, the "abracadabra" of the economist).UltimatheChosen said:
Oh god, I remember in high school, my friends parents couldn't afford internet(or they thought he was too addicted to it), so he swiped a bunch of those free disks and used free AOL for an entire year. We use to collect them for him when ever I passed by a rack of them.
I remember I compiled enough of those to have interenet for a year, and the rest I used for misc stuff. I still use them (i have literally BOXES yes, plural, moving sized boxes, full of them) for target practice for my guns.
You think it was the discs that did that?albino boo said:
I think it was the actual service offered, you know, before it became outdated.