Meet the People Who Still Have AOL Email Addresses
It’s not just Mike Pence and your grandma — a lot of people still use AOL and EarthLink, and pay for the privilege
--
“A lot of people don’t even realize AOL is still a thing,” says Catherine Russell, a 32-year-old production manager based in Washington, D.C. She still uses the original AOL email address she created when she was 12 — a mere 20 years ago.
Russell was eventually shamed into creating a Gmail account. She was working on the set of an indie film in 2006 when a crew member mocked her for using AOL. “He made some disparaging remark about that being archaic,” she says. “After that I got a Gmail account to use for job applications and professional communications.”
At its peak around 2000, AOL boasted more than 23 million subscribers across the U.S., while its competitor EarthLink had around 3 million. Most paid around $20 per month for email and dial-up. While a few companies deployed free email services in the late 1990s, it wasn’t until 2004 that Google launched free email with what was then an unfathomable one GB of online storage. It offered a radical alternative for users who’d constantly had to delete messages in overflowing inboxes. Two years later, AOL offered its own free version of email supported by advertising — but it was too little, too late. By 2012, Gmail had 425 million active users, while AOL’s subscriber base had dwindled to 3.5 million.
But despite the rise of broadband and free email, both AOL and EarthLink have somehow managed to survive. It’s difficult to get up-to-date figures, since the two entities are now subsidiaries and barely register as a blip on their parent companies’ balance sheets. Neither company would disclose its current number of monthly subscribers, but as of 2014, more than 2.1 million people still used AOL dial-up.
“The only real downside of having an AOL address now is the snickering from millennials who routinely assume that Grandpa is too dumb to use Gmail.”
John Levine, a consultant and the author of Internet for Dummies, pointed to AOL’s 2014 annual filing — the last year it broke out…
