AOL


Two thirds don't go over 5 hours. The average AOL subscriber pays $18/mo. 5/3/96
AOL: 7 million pieces of e-mail. The maximum number of simultaneous log-ons at the end of September 1996 was 140,000. That has already risen to 180,000. The Web system was serving 30 million URLs a day in July. Now it's up to 100 million URLs a day. (USPS: 580 million pieces a day) Seidman 11/8/96
"In December [1996], America Online customers logged a record 102 million hours on line, up from 45 million hours in September. The average America Online member now spends 32 minutes a day on line, up from 14 minutes in September. ... 4,500 customer representatives" NYT 1/17/97

Online Services Seen Peaking In Two Years

Friday February 16, 1996 BOSTON - A leading technology research firm says use of the major online services will peak in just two years, capping a meteoric five year rise when they went from virtually no subscribers to 15 million. Forrester Research is predicting in a new study that 1998 will be the peak year for the online providers, CompuServe and America Online. After that, the research firm said, consumers will link directly to the Internet and ignore the onlines. A key reason for the forecasted decline is that content providers will abandon the online services and sell their information directly to consumers on the World Wide Web, the graphical portion of the Internet that consumers can navigate with software browsers. "As soon as content providers can be sure of eyeballs and revenue somewhere else, they'll ditch the proprietary networks in a second," said Forrester's Emily Green, the researcher who wrote the report titled "Online Unravels." The content providers are likely to create loose alliances of publishers on the Internet, since the online services are not paying them enough to keep them on board. The result will be a steady decline in online subscriptions, while direct Internet subscriptions will climb from just 5 million this year to 32 million in four years. The onlines will drop from 15.8 million subscribers in 1998 to 12.5 million two years later, the report said. source
Every day ... 12/6/96

Reliability

"Our planned and unplanned downtime is down to just 1 percent, compared with 3.5 percent last year." (1/23/97)

According to a study commissioned by AT&T from Santa Clara, California-based Inverse Network Technologies, users calling AT&T WorldNet between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. manage to get through 93.4 percent of the time. Users calling AOL during the same hours, meanwhile, manage to connect just 36.7 percent of the time. (1/23/97) America Online background material.


Last updated by Henning Schulzrinne