Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah. That's a whole another story about how they double-crossed NetScape and signed a deal with Microsoft. Then they had, because they had bought a browser called BookLink. But the point is, is that people aren’t sophisticated in ’96, ’97, ’98. For all they know, AOL is the internet. And so, when I say that they’re sort of wrestling with this, they want to be somebody who describes it as they want to be the carnival cruise lines for an online experience, so they want to curate it for you. But then at the same time, the reality is, is that most people getting on the web and doing things like going to Yahoo or whatever, are doing it through AOL and they can’t conceptually tell the difference. I’d love to hold on to this until tech themes later but like, over and over and over again, the only thing that I'm thinking is bundling and unbundling. Like it is incredible how the entire internet, everything that we know as sort of the open web and various different protocols and things on various different platforms are all just bundled within AOL and they were basically making all the revenue for that for a very long time before we started to unbundle it all into these separate services. Now, there’s some also interesting things about AOL’s past which are not– AOL presented this sort of– Steve Case in his khakis in Gap ads, this sort of wholesome All-American thing. But they made most of their money by originally charging by the hour and most people were in the chat rooms doing sexy talk to each other, so in the background that's how they make their money. But also, they had a lot of things like accounting scandals where they get sued by even the attorney-general, like you’re not reporting – I can’t even remember the details, but they’re like reporting certain sales right away even though it should have been over time and things like that. So they kind of always were playing fast and loose but you can feel like, again, these are scrappers that are staying alive, staying alive with this dream of online becoming a thing until it finally is a thing. And it’s essentially ’96-’97 that it is a thing. And they wake up and they have 10 million subscribers that 60 percent of internet traffic is going through their pipes in ’98 or is it ’97, You’ve Got Mail - The Movie. Like again, we cannot underemphasize how much AOL was sort of the gateway for America embracing online and the web and the internet. They’re also on the web, they’re a portal like Yahoo is. By the year 2000, 4 out of every 5 web users were visiting an AOL property at least once a month. And they start to make real money by ’97-’98. So again –…

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