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AOL to users: You've got ads
What do AOL users get for $25.90 a month? Increasingly, the same thing Web users get for free -- like ad banners attached to their email. AOL has quietly added ads that appear when users read email using AOL's dial-up software, though unlike Google's controversial Gmail ads, they aren't targeted to the words that appear in the email. Here's AOL user NJMom72's unvarnished opinion of the ads: "They are so annoying! You have to wait for them to load before your email loads, they shorten the space of your email so you have to scroll to even read it AND they automatically refresh themselves to new ads! UGH! I almost hate to read my email now because of this...booooooooo AOL!"
There is so much truth in this. AOL runs ads in the background like ways of creating a tab for the promotion or putting ads in a ticker that takes so long to load before your e-mail loads.
I've been with aol about 13 years, since back in the days when my bill was $300-400 a month when they charged by the minute, and I am LIVID about these ads! I went around and changed my email address everywhere, prepatory to cancelling, since we have comcast for broadband and don't need aol, but when I called they lowered my monthly bill to $4.95 a month so I kept it, and I use thunderbird (free download at mozilla.org) to pull my email off and read it offline, no ads that way, plus I re-downloaded aol 8.0 (keyword aol downloads) and I'm using it now, there are no ads in 8.0. I figure it's worth 5 bucks a month to keep my favorite places, but I'm starting to transfer them as well, in case I cancel aol completely. This is unforgivable, it's the biggest corporate misstep since new coke.
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