In 1993, Internet access was made up of three biggies. The text-heavy CompuServe, owned by the tax accounting people H&R Block and about a million members. Prodigy, a cartoon oriented joint venture of CBS, Sears and IBM with about one million members also. The last and least (at that time) was America Online (AOL), with its elegant Graphical User Interface (GUI), chat rooms and exclusive community building technology that went public the year prior with just under 250,000 members. Steve Case, the founder was doing about $40 million a year in revenue. However, the one advantage AOL had over the other Internet Service Providers (ISP) was its name. Their name America Online says what the service is; Prodigy and CompuServe could be almost anything.
Jan Brandt took AOL to 2 million members by using her experience as a direct marketing wizard who had a solid grounding in continuity marketing. She did it by working long (hundred-hour weeks) and hard to mount between 2,000 and 3,000 marketing test a year. This strategy worked so well that it enabled AOL to acquire the vast Time Warner empire as well as its early rival, CompuServe, all in just 7 years. Because AOL itself was unique, and Brandt was thoroughly grounded in the old rules of direct marketing, AOL's membership rose to 22 million. And this was amid the dot-com crash. AOL's revenue came from automatically hitting 22 million credit cards for membership dues a month, or $525 million a month which is $6.3 billion a year.
Wall Street started noticing that AOL was beginning to cool down; it wasn't signing up new members with the same momentum. With 47% of the Internet market, AOL had creamed the stock market; all the obvious people had bought in; new members were costing more and more to acquire and the growth was incremental. To me at the time, it was obvious, AOL became complacent and forgot the reason it was a big success. AOL had a huge, loyal, captive audience of 22 million people. Any marketer, even with half of his brain tied behind his back, could figure out how to delight the membership by making wonderful exclusive offers and set back and rake in the money. Happy members would tell non-members about these great offers and the buzz would generate more members that wanted in on the action.
With the downturn of AOL and resignation of AOL chairman Steve Case comes a new age of superior ISPs, offering not only amenities like multiple POP email accounts, instant messaging and accelerated optimized web-surfing, but also a chance for subscribers to make significant commissions as distributors.
With over 10,000,000 hits per month and more than 200 people in the sign-up area each hour, it is the ISP that is also a genius Direct Marketing business opportunity, offering the chance for active distributors to earn incomes with an innovative brand new pay system called the "SuperLine®". This ISP / business opportunity entered the game with 90 million pre-qualified customers just in the US alone and a product that is in high demand worldwide. In order for a business opportunity to succeed, it must sell a product that is in demand and offers longevity demand to create an ongoing stream of income. It's safe to say that the Internet is not going anywhere, and people are always searching for the best deal on their ISP. Switchisp.com®'s low prices and quality service make this company one that will be here for the long haul. It is now an international business opportunity for all people on the entire planet, including the US, Canada, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and the European Union. Check it out at: http://www.switch-isp.blogspot.com nothing to lose and every thing to gain.
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