AOL's Colossal CD Campaign

HighSpeedInternet.com Aol's COLOSSAL CD CAMPAIGN 20 years ago, AOL started spamming your mailbox with free CDs before giving it up in 2005. HSI compiled the stats from that campaign-what we found will MELT YOUR MIND! From 1993 -2005, America On Line sent at least 660,00 00CDS all over the United States. FUN FACT The CD push actually started with 200,000 3.5" AOL floppy disks, one of which 70 In that period, AOL physically was auctioned off on produced 70x more CDs than x Michail m eBay in 2007 for $5,000! the best-selling album of all time: Michael Jackson's Thrieler Thriller, which sold 42.4 (no indication that it actually sold for that much) million copies! AOL also produced 3.5 CDs every second for 12 years straight in that same time span. FUN FACT Stacking all 660 million of those CDs would result in a tower 492 miles high. That's roughly 1000 times taller than the tallest building in the world-tall enough to knock satellites out of orbit. 211MM Just to deliver the CDs AOL had to spend $211,000,000 on postage. (32e per CD average postal cost in 1998) It cost AOL $300,000,000 to produce all of those CDs that's $100 Million more than it took to produce Titanic, the most expensive movie ever made at the time. In 1998 AOL used all of the worldwide CD production for several weeks. Not a single music or Microsoft CD was produced during At one point, 50% of all CDs produced worldwide had an AOL logo on them.* the brief time. *according to AOL's former Chief Marketing Officer, Jan Brandt In 1992 AOL had less than 200,000 subscribers. Then, after a decade of sending out CDs, their subscriber count had jumped by 12,000% to FUN FACT SUBSCRIBE AOL was logging-in new subscribers at the rate of one 25,000,000! every six seconds during their prime in the mid-90s. FUN FACT With only 25 million subscribers, the company wasted some 635,000,000 CDs on people that didn't convert. 600,000 of those wasted CDs were taken to Long Knoll Park in Kilmington, England Californians Jim McKenna and John Lieberman set out to send 1,000,000 of the to create a "sea CDsback to AOL in 2002. They collected over of CDs". * 400,000 CDs *(http://gizmodo.com/5570737/ half-a-million-cds- before they were shut down. in-a-sea-of-obsolescence) In 2007 AOL CDs were awarded the title of #1 NOT-THAT-FUN FACT "Most Annoying Tech Product" The environmental by PCWorld, beating out MySpace and impact of the 660 million CDs is Tamagotchi along the way. tremendous with the average CD lasting for more than 200 years, those CDs will be filling landfills for centuries. AOL is still alive and kicking. In 2012, AOL added +200,000 WE WANT YOU! dial-up subscribers to their 3.5 million total.* *http://gizmodo.com/5856113/35-million-people- are-still-using-aol-dialup- In February 2013 they reported a revenue of $599.50 $599,50000 the first growth in quarterly revenue in the past 8 years ...So in that quarter alone AOL recouped the cost of their early CD spree. Kudos AOL! hsi HIGHSPEED INTERNET.COM HighSpeedInternet.com