AOL spent over $300 million in the 1990s to saturate the market with free trial CDs, leading to a significant increase in subscribers. The CDs were given away in various locations and are now collectibles with a market on eBay.
If you received snail mail in the 1990s, no doubt you found some free American Online CD-ROMs in your mailbox. Maybe even dozens, over the course of the decade. In an effort to capture the dial-up Internet market in the United States, AOL spent more than $300 million saturating the market with trial discs, which offered users limited free access. Steve Case, the company’s CEO at the time, said the direct marketing flood worked, as AOL went from 200,000 subscribers in 1992 when the company went public, to about 25 million users a decade later.
AOL anyone?
In 1992, AOL followed Prodigy and CompuServe into the online services market. Instead of focusing on spending on TV advertising, AOL went rogue. One of his first campaigns gave away CDs in Blockbuster video stores.
Free offers came to you from everywhere. CDs could be found in cereal boxes, on airplane meal trays, at NASCAR races, on Super Bowl seats, and even tucked into packets of Omaha Steaks.
Today, there are collectors who covet the records, says deputy writer Arielle Pardes, adding that the biggest devotee has more than 4,000 unique AOL records. There is still a vibrant market for them on eBay.
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