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A comment on The Last Message Sent on AIM. Parent comment

Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM by polynomial on Monday March 01, 2021 @09:36AM (#26303114)
Even if those rumors are true (and no one has ever seen fit to publish them, so there's that) it wasn't just a single executive that killed AIM, it was multiple points of failure, including keeping it ad-free, which meant it pretty much existed outside AOL's revenue ecosystem, out on its own. And when Appelman & team released their open source version, that was akin to declaring a mutiny at anti-OSS AOL.

Products need internal champions, without which, it doesn't take a conspiracy to kill them, they will just atrophy on their own.

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Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM by jaywalk on Monday March 01, 2021 @10:21AM (#26303549)
It's obviously been a long time so my memory could be faulty, but I distinctly remember ads in AIM and installing cracked versions of the client that removed the ads.
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Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM by Macha on Monday March 01, 2021 @10:34AM (#26303683)
Yeah, in the last few years there was a big permanent ad at the footer of the contact list, plenty of ads in the web client and I think at one point there were sidebar ads in chat (that last one could have been msn)
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Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM by polynomial on Monday March 01, 2021 @10:44AM (#26303839)
JTBC, I meant revenue generating ads, not ads for other AOL products.
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Re:The Last Message Sent on AIM by Macha on Monday March 01, 2021 @10:46AM (#26303867)
Maybe they had no inventory in your region, or you're remembering an earlier time? It definitely had auctioned ads in 2014.
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