Recently, PC magazine had an article highlighting how important old people are to AOL's returns. In the article, "Is AOL Scamming Old People?", they highlighted a quote from the New Yorker article about AOL's CEO Tim Armstrong.
'[M]any of [AOL's subscribers] are older people who have cable or DSL service but don't realize that they need not pay an additional twenty-five dollars a month to get online and check their e-mail. "The dirty little secret," a former AOL executive says, "is that seventy-five per cent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it"'
So AOL is making a lot of money from old people who can easily unsubscribe while keeping their email adress. PC magazine said the money AOL was making from these old people was $244 million in Q3 of last year. With this information in mind, it seems strange that AOL would do something that could get a lot of those old people very angry. With the decision to buy the Huffington Post, they also decided to become the face of liberal media online. While the stock market's reaction implies that the $315 million dollar purchase was a bad idea on its own merits, they are probably missing the consequences of AOL putting a bit "Liberal Media" target on its back.
Most old people lean right. A 2009 Gallup survey found that 48% of people over the age of 65 identify as conservative while only 16% identify themselves as liberal. It might not be long until right leaning media personalities decide that they can fight back against liberal media and save their fans money by encouraging them to unsubscribe from their useless AOL accounts. Right now AOL is losing subscribers at a rate of 30% a year. This move may have hastened the decline. It will be interesting to see if AOL will be able to reinvent themselves and find a new niche to replace the old one they are losing.