Sad.

When I heard the news that AOL was buying The Huffington Post (AOL purchasing a prominent media group, what is this 2000? Deja vu. Yeah, that's an AOL-Time Warner joke...deal with it), I joked to Eagan that they better not try to mail us CDs with 100 hours of free internet time. Archaic AOL jokes aside, it got me thinking about AOL, and what AOL used to be. I read a recent article on AOL in The New Yorker about their new CEO and the changes they're trying to make. I was struck by a fact mentioned in the article: That 80% of AOL's profits are still from subscribers. Wait, what?!? Who is still subscribing to AOL? Apparently old people:

The company still gets eighty per cent of its profits from subscribers, many of whom are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. "The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five per cent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it." (My emphasis added)

Well, that breaks your effing heart. Do me a favor, if your grandparents still pay for AOL, tell them they don't need it.

Just say no.