Dial-Up Lifers Still Love AOL

At its peak, nearly a decade ago, AOL had some 26 million dial-up subscribers. But in recent years, those numbers have dwindled as consumers migrated to more modern, speedier offerings that don’t require an antique Global Village Teleport 56K. Frankly, who wouldn’t?

Turns out, a lot of people. Millions, actually.

As Dan Frommer points out over at SplatF (worth bookmarking if you haven’t done so already), AOL still had 3.5 million dial-up subscribers as of the end of September. And interestingly, most have been using the service for an average of more than 10 years.

Sadly for AOL, the maturity of that subscriber base is in no way a guarantee of retention. The company still lost about 630,000 subs in the current quarter compared to last year. Ugly news, particularly since a lot of AOL’s profit comes from its access business.