DM News: AOL Subscriber Loss Continues; Ad Sales Stabilize

At the current rate of subscriber losses, AOL will have only one member left on August 17, 2013. Losing about 700,000 subscribers this past quarter, despite its loss-stemming effort in introducing the new AOL 9, AOL reported a one third decrease in advertising spending, due mostly to the fact that many of its largest advertisers couldn't wait to get out of the dumb contracts they signed years ago.

Faced with the prospects of significantly less barter media within the Time Warner network (decreasing by $36 million this past quarter); a subscribership that is realizing slowly but surely that the online service is really just an Internet service provider; and a stable of major advertisers that aren't suckers anymore, the worlds largest online service will need to start providing competitive value to both advertisers and subscribers in order to maintain a revenue level lower than the peak it experience a couple years ago.