Word: aol
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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During the Web's infancy---long before Google was a site, let alone a verb--AOL reigned supreme and alone. But 17 years after modems squawked onto the debut dial-ups, competition has sped ahead, and AOL may finally be ditching its once lucrative subscription model for a more promising ad-driven approach...
...AOL, for any company, fourth place just isn't good enough. With Yahoo!, Google and MSN having built better webtraps, AOL is preparing to reinvent itself to catch up. Its parent company, Time Warner (which is also TIME's parent), announced it will present a new plan for AOL on Aug. 2. The 2000 merger with AOL was supposed to be a cure for Time Warner's slow-growth old-media businesses, but it has been a financial disaster, costing Time Warner nearly $100 billion in market value. AOL's inability to remake itself into a more Google- or Yahoo...
Come August, AOL may fully embrace that strategy. To compete more aggressively for the expanding pool of Web advertising revenue, AOL is expected to throw the gates open to its previously private Web. "We'll be behaving more like a portal than ever before," says a company executive, who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized to talk about the plans. (The company declined TIME's repeated requests for an interview.) As part of the switch, analysts expect AOL to stop charging a subscription fee to anyone who gets high-speed service from another provider and to offer free access...
Yahoo! and Google continue to give away most of their new products, banking on the robust growth of the ad market, which last year yielded $12.5 billion, up 30% from 2004, which was up 33% from 2003. By redeploying its resources toward broadening its audience, the rationale goes, AOL will be able to compete more efficiently, dropping, among other costs, the hundreds of millions it has been spending to attract new subscribers. The risk is that advertising sales won't grow quickly enough to offset the loss of subscription dollars...
...gardens are farmed by 350 poor people, each of whom have a plot where they make dinners from the corn, bananas, guava, cactus, mulberries, avocado and sugar cane they grow. It is one of the most surreal things I've ever seen, and I was at Time Warner when AOL bought it. But the gardens are also not the weirdest thing...