Is it true that AOL users are naive?
According to one website AOL users are the suckers of the internet.
They click on google ads something like 5 times as much as normal users.
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AOL users have a clickthrough rate on advertisements that is roughly 5background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;% higher than any other demographic on the net. They are the least able to distinguish between an organic link and a paid advertisement. They're rubes. Easily conned. They buy more penis enlargement pills and beanie babies than anyone else on earth. Google admits that AOL accounts for 1background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px;% of their total revenue, but what they WON'T admit is how much AOL contributes to their total profit.
Here's a hint- it's a lot more than the 2% that Wall Street analysts have been guesstimating. Because they have worked from the assumption that AOL users click on ads at the same rate as the average net user- which is completely false. Anyone who has ever run a high traffic site can tell you that- or hell you can just slide on over to webmasterworld.com or any similar forum and read pages and pages of comments about the "AOL effect." Remember, Microsoft backed out of the negotiations because they claim AOL wanted concessions that were completely unethical- namely giving AOL results higher rankings in certain categories like video, etc. Google had to REALLY need AOL's profits if they were willing to stoop this low. They knew the Slashdot crowd was going to go apeshit when AOL logos started appearing all along the side of search results, but Google doesn't care- Slashdot users almost never click on ads anyway. They're too experienced. They just tune the ads out.
Back in college I had a friend who worked for a few weeks as a telemarketer/phone scammer. In that industry there is something known as a "suckers list" which is a list of names and numbers of people who have been successfully scammed or ripped off in the past. Current and up-to-date copies of that list for any given region were worth their weight in gold to telemarketers, and sometimes went for up to 3background-color: #b7c3cf; -moz-border-radius: 10px; min-height: 20px; width: 575px; font-weight: normal; padding: 15px 15px 15px 15px; dollars per name depending on the type of scam they fell for.
AOL's membership is the modern day equivalent of that suckers list.
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