AOL: Ads On Line

As you may have noticed from the brevity of my entries, I'm not one to waste words. There isn't a lot of extra time in my life or, I imagine, yours. So I won't spend any of it lamenting the new AOL banner ads placed on the private journals of paying members. Yes, it's insulting, infuriating and abusive. But it's not personal. It's just business.

Most likely, someone whose job it is to generate advertising revenue for Time Warner shareholders noticed there were a few thousand pages -- AKA personal journals -- out here with income potential, and they went for it.

It's also likely that the resulting income from the advertisers is much, much more than whatever we're paying for membership. Membership income is steadily declining. (Go figure.) Membership is the old, failing business model. Advertising is the present and the future of the company; advertisers keep the paychecks coming.

So if you were an AOL exec, whose interests would you serve?

If there is anything that might get the ads off -- and I sincerely doubt there is -- it would be to persuade the advertisers to request that their ads not run on AOL private journals. If you care enough to try, the best way is to contact the advertisers directly. Trust me, they are not reading your journals, so venting or retaliating there is not effective by itself. (Many of us have already figured this out: See Tilting at Windmills.)

Don't bother calling customer service. Write the PR and marketing department executives. Some companies list them in their annual reports, others you can probably find at Hoover's. Failing that, try the feedback links on their Web sites.

When you write, express yourself in a professional, civil tone. Explain why this is bad business for them, not how it affects you personally. Quote negative comments from journals, include URLs to bad buzz on their companies resulting from these ads. Don't bother with screen shots or attachments. Most companies won't open them. Ask for a response.

Then weigh your options:

1. Wait to see what happens

2. Settle down and suck it up

3. Start over somewhere else

Pick one.

If you do move on, be sure to spread the word and post your new URL: The Great Exodus. As long as we can find each other, we'll be OK. A community is people, not an ISP. It's not a business. It's personal.