100 Objects #22: AOL Disc

In the 1990s, AOL introduced millions of Americans to the internet with its ubiquitous free CDs, but how did the company that once dominated the internet nearly disappear?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Roman Mars?

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  Like, when was the last time you thought about an aqueduct? Yet, that doesn't mean they're any less impressive. You could say the same thing about PNC Bank's smart, calculated approach to banking. It won't make for flashy headlines or trends on social media, but it'll make the right money moves that'll help set you up for the successful financial future you're looking for, a design everyone can get behind. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC. 99% Invisible is presented by Acura. Curating and designing the perfect experience takes meticulous craft, an obsession with detail, and a love for innovation. Just like museum designers,

• 1:28Roman Mars?

  Acura carefully considers every detail to curate the most engaging, exhilarating, and rewarding experience for drivers. That craft isn't always something you can see, but it's something you'll feel, that flutter in your heart, the engine roars. Every Acura is designed with deliberate intention around how people actually use the vehicles. And that is precision-crafted performance. In 1998, the recording industry was thriving. This was a year before Napster came out and ruined everything. But in these halcyon days, two years before the millennium, things never looked better. The music industry was putting up record numbers

• 2:11Roman Mars?

  and selling an unprecedented number of CDs. Brandy, Shania Twain, and Savage Garden topped the charts. And thanks to Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On", the Titanic soundtrack spent 16 weeks at number one and sold 9 million copies in 1998 alone.

• 2:31Roman Mars?

  But the company pressing more compact discs than anyone else in America wasn't a record label. It was an internet company: America Online.

• 2:44Roman Mars?

  And according to its chief marketing officer, at one point, half of all CDs produced on Earth were AOL discs.

• 2:54Roman Mars?

  But the AOL CD didn't play music. It wouldn't even work in your Discman. It was, instead, a marketing ploy, a free sample. It held a tiny piece of software that turned your computer into a doorway. Slide it into your drive, and with a shock of static, it would connect you, often for the very first time, to something called the internet.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  If you weren't alive during AOL's heyday, it is hard to describe how ubiquitous the AOL CD was.

• 3:24Roman Mars?

  This is reporter Alex Goldman. You may recognize him as one of the hosts of Reply All. Now, he has his own show called Hyperfixed.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  You simply never knew where you were going to find one, wrapped in plastic, inside a little cardboard sleeve promising some number of hours of free AOL. Perhaps when you opened a cereal box, or a magazine, or in display cases at the bookstore or at Starbucks. In one push, AOL even paid to put them on seats at the Super Bowl.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Probably the craziest one I did was Omaha Steaks.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  This is Jan Brant, the mastermind behind the AOL CD campaign. And if Omaha Steaks is not a name that's familiar to you, it's a company that will mail you flash-frozen Wagyu beef. But for a stretch of the mid-'90s, if you got an Omaha Steak in the mail, chances are you also got an AOL CD.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  Because those products are sent flash-frozen. We had to flash-freeze a disc thawed and see if it still worked.

• 4:31Speaker 01

  The AOL disc was a marketing coup, hugely successful. And it's not an overstatement to say that it's the campaign that introduced America to the internet. Because of how well it worked, for a while, the internet was AOL. To be on AOL was to be on the internet. They were the same thing. And then, it felt like AOL just disappeared. The company that once accounted for half of the CDs on Earth became a punchline, then a footnote, and then just an email address that your parents use.

• 5:10Roman Mars?

  From 99% Invisible and BBC Studios, this is A History of the United States in 100 Objects. I'm Roman Mars. Today, the AOL disc. Alex Goldman has the story.

• 5:28Speaker 01

  When Jan Brant joined the company in 1993, AOL was a small fish in a rapidly expanding pond. And Jan herself had only a passing familiarity with the very concept of the internet.

• 5:42Speaker 02

  I used it while I was in college, only once. I was dating someone from MIT, and he took me up to the MIT lab and showed me how he could talk to people all over the world. And in fact, there, we played one of the earliest video games in the lab. Then, many years later, when I assumed a marketing position at XEP, Xerox, Prodigy came out. And we weren't advertising, certainly, on the internet at that point. But I decided that I needed to understand what this was.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  In the late '80s, the internet still mostly lived in research universities and government facilities. And for a civilian like Jan, even connecting to the internet was hard. And I knew this difficulty firsthand, because back then, I was a little nerd, desperate to figure out how to use my computer like Matthew Broderick did in the 1984 Thriller War games, to hack into a government mainframe, save humanity, change the grade on my science test. But even a precocious nerd like me had a hard time accessing the internet. Since my home computer wasn't constantly connected to the internet, I needed to find a service I could dial into. And I found that in a local server called ArberNet, that I remember having four available phone lines and a couple thousand users. And once I finally connected to the internet,

• 7:10Speaker 01

  I was greeted with a screen, basically from The Matrix. Green text, black background, no images. I could send messages to other people on the server, but because there were only four phone lines, I generally had to check back the next day to see if they'd responded. It was ugly, and it was hard to use. And if my dad got a phone call, I would lose my connection and have to start the process all over again.

• 7:33Speaker 01

  This iteration of the internet was not poised to become the technology we know today. And the folks at AOL had a vision of the internet, which was inviting, image-based, clickable, the whole shebang. But in the early '90s, AOL was far behind its two main competitors. One was a company called CompuServe, which was owned by H&R Block and geared more toward businesses. AOL's other main competitor, Prodigy, was obsessed with safety. Swearing was not allowed on the service, and they didn't even have a chat offering until later because of safety concerns. Still, Prodigy had 10 times as many users as AOL in 1993. And AOL had to figure out a way to distinguish itself. I wanted to ask this question for younger folks in our audience,

• 8:17Speaker 01

  but can you explain what AOL was for those people? Like, what did AOL offer people at this early era?

• 8:24Speaker 02

  It absolutely offered them community, a gathering place, a place to connect with friends, with family. We lived in a world back then that didn't have the kind of communication that we have. There was no FaceTime, there was no streaming, there was no video.

• 8:44Speaker 01

  AOL settled on a mantra inside the company they called the three Cs: communications, community, and clarity. This idea that what they were building wasn't about launching people into the computer age, but about flattening distances between users and their relatives or their curiosity. AOL's goal was to feel more like a place to hang out than any of the other companies could offer. When you logged into AOL after you cleared the crunchy whale of your modem, it would offer you a menu of attractive clickable images, in color, that said things like "today's news" and "personal finance." If you clicked on "today's news", you'd be sent to a curated news digest from wire services, handpicked by AOL. You could then join a chat room,

• 9:28Speaker 01

  talk about the news, vent, argue, connect. There were forums for various hobbies and interests, games to play, chats to join, emails to send and receive. This was a vision of the internet focused on curation and community, a walled garden of information and other AOL users to connect with.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  And to make it feel inviting, they paid an AOL employee's husband $200 to rattle off some phrases into a portable tape recorder. So every time you logged in, it would say, Welcome. And when you signed off, Goodbye.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  When Jan joined the company, she had a team of five. That was the company's entire marketing department. It was her job to sell AOL to America, which was going to be tough. Because first of all, AOL is expensive. It costs $9.95, not for a month, but for five hours. After that, it became $3.50 for every extra hour. But she had a bigger problem to solve, which was convincing people that the internet was worth trying at all.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  People back then couldn't imagine why they'd want to be on the internet. You know, it was this funny funky computer thing.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  I mean, the internet was so young at that point.

• 10:40Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  I imagine that a lot of people didn't really know what it was you were selling.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  People thought I was going to work at American Airlines. And I said, no, I'm not a flight attendant.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  Jan found that once she corrected this misapprehension and tried to tell them what AOL actually was, it didn't really get any easier.

• 10:58Speaker 02

  That was the problem that I was trying to solve. How do you describe to someone that you're sitting on your computer and you're talking to 10 people? They say, well, if I want to talk to someone, I'm just going to pick up a phone. Or how do you describe that you can have the encyclopedia at your fingertips to help your kids with homework? And they say, I've got 92 volumes of encyclopedia in my house. I could just go do that, or the news, or any of those things. There was nothing that they could relate to. And that's why there was the disk.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  The AOL disk was Jan's innovation. She thought that if people could actually experience the internet, they would get it. So she wanted to send out free samples, a few hours of AOL on a disk, free of charge. All she had to do was ask her boss, CEO Steve Case, for the money to do it.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  I walked into Steve's office and said, I want to do a large test. I want to send the discs out free in the mail, and I need $250,000. Very, very expensive package. We were a $38 million company.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Wow, okay. So $250,000 for a $38 million company is a huge investment. That's a big, big, big amount of money.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  He teased me and said, oh, well, go ahead. I don't think it's going to work.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Now that she had Steve's approval, all she had to do was figure out who to send the discs to. And the first group she looked for were the people who were already using the computer.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  Back then, we didn't have a workforce that was so equitably spread across, you know, men and women and different ethnic groups and so forth. In the upper suites of business, we were still very white male oriented. And these were people who had access and had familiarity with computers in the workplace. So I went to the computer magazines, the PC worlds and the Mac worlds, and Scientific American, Popular Science, Car and Driver, places where I thought that I would find pockets of men.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  Jan paid these magazines for their subscriber lists and began to send these pockets of men packets of discs. The discs themselves in this first batch were 3.5 inch floppy disks, shrink wrapped to cardboard with colorful text reading, "It's easy, it's fun, it's free." The computer was such a fresh object at this point that the instructions for installation were written right across the disc's label. Insert this disc into your floppy disk drive, then double click on the install icon and copy the software to your hard drive. And then Jan waited to see who would sign in.

• 13:55Speaker 02

  I didn't do anything that wasn't tracked. Everyone thinks that it's the ubiquity strategy. I just threw them all over the place. I could tell you the cost of each subscriber and my projected lifetime value for every disc that went out. Now, I didn't have a sheet that listed everyone, but by groups and by codes, and everything was coded.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Oh, so when people signed up, you would know where they came from?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:23Speaker 01

  So you do this first trial, this $250,000 trial. How does it go?

• 14:28Speaker 02

  Most people would say in direct marketing back then, you might get an average of 1% to 2.5% response to a mailing. This one produced a staggering 12%. That's 12% of the people took the disc, put it into the computer, put in their credit card. I had one list that was 18% response. Nearly one out of every five people who received that disc from that list signed up as a member. It was staggering. The cost of the mailing was staggering, but the response was breathtaking.

• 15:10Speaker 01

  The results of these early tests were unbelievable. As long as she could get discs in people's hands, they were five times more likely to pay for AOL as they were your average direct mailing. AOL later switched from floppy disks to CDs. And make no mistake, these discs and the hours were expensive for the company. But Jan told her bosses, don't look at the cost, look at the return. CEO Steve Case later said that the average cost to secure a new customer with an AOL CD was a whopping $35, but they would end up spending 10 times as much in monthly fees once they became a customer, a huge return on investment. So Jan was off to the races, moving from advertising to hardcore computer users to

• 15:53Speaker 01

  more casual users, the eventual goal of reaching people who may not even have a computer at all.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I always described it as consider marketing to be like concentric circles. In the very middle, you're going to find that person that if they didn't have the internet at their disposal, they would have invented it because they are so the target audience. You go outer circle, these are people who are less interested but curious and willing to try. You go outer circle, and it's now moving into more mainstream. And that's what we were becoming. And you keep going. I kept pushing the circles out.

• 16:34Speaker 01

  When Jan joined the company in 1993, AOL had 200,000 members. By the summer of the following year, they had reached 1 million.

• 16:46Speaker 01

  And they were sending out so many discs, they couldn't get them in the mailers fast enough.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  I had to actually work with a vendor to develop a machine that would automatically insert the disc into the mailer. But I sat there bored to tears when they brought me in a diagram of what this machine would do. And then the disc is going to flip over here, and this is going to grab it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that makes complete sense. That's wonderful. That's terrific. I had no idea what they were talking about.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  It wasn't long before Jan started striking deals with magazines where instead of getting their subscriber list, they would just pack a AOL discs with the magazine itself, gluing it to the front page like a perfume sample. And even then, Jan was thinking way bigger. She saw opportunities everywhere.

• 17:42Speaker 02

  I had a routine on Friday nights after a crushingly long week. I wanted to see no one. I wanted to talk to no one. I wanted to unwind. And my routine would be, I'd leave the office, and my first stop would be the grocery store for the weekend. The second stop would be Blockbuster. And I would get like eight movies because I didn't know what I wanted to watch. I didn't know what mood I'd be in, so I'd get a little bit of everything. One day I was in there, and they had a gift box. If you rented four movies, you'd get like a sample box.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  They had like a little popcorn, TV guide, maybe, and that was yours free if you rented four movies. I had eight movies. I looked at them, and I said, I'm taking two boxes. I took one home, and that Monday, I walked to a staff member of mine and said, get us in this box. Now, why did I do that? I looked around Blockbuster, and there were all of these families with kids. And a lot of the initial take up on AOL was coming, not just from men, but a little bit later on, by families. I was on a flight from Dulles to New York City, and I looked around me, and it was

• 19:08Speaker 02

  all business people. And I walk into the office, whenever I get back, and say, okay, I want us to have a disc served with coffee and the cookie they give you on commuter business flights. I hired someone, and I said, your job is to find unusual places to put these discs. I couldn't find a place where it didn't work.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Suddenly, these discs were everywhere. And I mean everywhere. According to Jan, AOL was, at the time, the largest mailer in the United States.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  You were sending more mail than anyone else in the US?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  I read that there were like, that half of all CDs being made at one point were AOL CDs?

• 19:54Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 19:55Speaker 01

  I also read that if you stacked them

• 19:57Speaker 02

  To the moon.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Uh, on top of one another, they would get all the way to the moon. Right.

• 20:00Speaker 02

  That was from one of the talks I gave, yeah.

• 20:04Speaker 01

  For new users, they were a gateway, but for existing users, they were a nuisance that came included in just about everything they bought and still randomly showed up in the mail every so often. It got to the point where in 2002, two guys in California started a website called nomorealcds.com with the stated goal of gathering 1 million of these discs to mail back to the company. Even inside AOL, there were people who were uncomfortable with the volume of discs, but Jan wouldn't budge on their efficacy.

• 20:36Speaker 02

  I had several senior management conversations on it. And it's like, okay, I can cut back on the discs. How much of a reduction in subscriber growth do you want? You know?

• 20:51Speaker 02

  If you want growth, I need to do it the way I know how to do it and the way that's working.

• 20:57Speaker 01

  The AOL disc promotion worked so fantastically well that at some points it was too successful. There were times when there were so many new users trying to dial into AOL that they would get busy signals for hours. Critics started calling the service "America on Hold", and Jan's bosses were like, "We need to cool it on the discs for a little while."

• 21:18Speaker 02

  We overloaded the system. It was a time when I halted, not all, but I halted almost all of the marketing.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  But they only paused the campaign for a little while. Jan was succeeding not only in selling AOL as a product, but selling the internet as a concept. More and more, the internet was becoming the first place people went to when something major happened.

• 21:41Speaker 02

  When Princess Diana died, people not only turned on their TVs, but they went online to AOL and were grieving. The message boards blew up with people gathering. It became a place where people went to share that experience with people they didn't know of how sad they felt, or a memory of her, seeing her someplace.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  AOL's vision of the internet as a community, a curated place to connect, it had won out. By the year 2000, the company had left its competitors in the dust. AOL had 25 million subscribers, meaning a huge chunk of users were signing into AOL's walled garden. Half of anyone accessing the internet, according to AOL's CEO. This was a spectacular, unprecedented level of success, all thanks to the discs Jan sent to anyone and everyone she could find. The company was so big, so ubiquitous, it became shorthand for the internet itself. I mean, hell, a movie came out in 1998, named after a phrase often uttered by the program.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  You've got mail.

• 22:50Speaker 01

  Even I had forgotten how powerful AOL was during this time, which became very obvious during this interaction that I had with Jan. Okay, so the company expanded massively. You were bought by Time Warner from billions upon billions.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no. We bought Time Warner.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  Oh, you bought Time Warner. Sorry. Thank you.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  And we humbly called it a merger of equals.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  This company, which just a few years ago had been struggling to survive in a marketplace that didn't really understand what it was selling, bought one of the largest media companies in the world just seven years later.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  AOL was unstoppable. It was impossible to imagine the internet without it. But I'm talking to you from 2026, where AOL and its ubiquitous discs are being eulogized by some nerdy podcaster. So what happened?

• 23:47Roman Mars?

  Instagram teen accounts have automatic protections on by default. Built-in content settings for the content teens can see, contact limits for who can contact them, and time management tools like daily time limits and sleep mode. Teens are automatically placed into teen accounts, and teens under 16 will need a parent's permission to change any of these settings to be less strict. Instagram will continue adding built-in safety features to help create age-appropriate experiences. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts. This episode is presented by Air France. Air France Business Cabin offers comfort from start to finish. Enjoy priority check-in and boarding, followed by access to peaceful

• 24:31Roman Mars?

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• 25:01Speaker 04

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• 25:30Roman Mars?

  This episode is brought to you by PNC Bank. Some design was made to be seen by all, like, for example, the seven wonders of the world. I mean, everyone should see those. While some were made to be less seen, like sewer systems. Like, when was the last time you thought about an aqueduct? Yet that doesn't mean they're any less impressive. You could say the same thing about PNC Bank's smart, calculated approach to banking. It won't make for flashy headlines or trends on social media, but it'll make the right money moves that'll help set you up for the successful financial future you're looking for. A design everyone can get behind. PNC Bank, brilliantly boring since 1865. Brilliantly boring since 1865 is a registered mark of the PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. PNC Bank, National Association, Member FDIC.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  America Online AOL, the internet services company, is merging with Time Warner. $160 billion, the biggest corporate takeover ever.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  When AOL and Time Warner announced that they would be joining forces in 2000, it was the largest merger in American business history.

• 26:31Speaker 05

  America's biggest internet company with 20 million subscribers, merging with the nation's largest media and entertainment company, creating a giant worth $350 billion.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  People thought it would usher in a whole new era of media. The biggest internet company merging with the biggest media company. This was the future.

• 26:52Speaker 03

  This merger will launch the next internet revolution.

• 26:57Speaker 01

  But almost immediately, there were issues. And within a decade, Time Warner would sell off AOL at a 98% discount. It went so badly that the merger got another superlative: the worst deal in history.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  Both companies had tanked, but particularly AOL, the company that, as Jan pointed out, bought Time Warner in the first place. So what happened? The trouble started before the merger was even announced, because by 2000, the internet was changing. And what AOL had banked its business on was about to become obsolete. This might be hard to remember, but when AOL was in its prime, you couldn't connect to the internet in a sustained, always-on way outside of universities. You had to dial in to something else before you could explore the internet. And AOL had made a mint being the thing that you connected to. And since they were pretty much the only game in town, their service was a walled

• 27:59Speaker 01

  garden. You could chat, but in their chat rooms. You could use forums, play games, and read articles, but it was all hosted by AOL. But the internet was changing. Starting in the early 2000s, companies were offering this new product called broadband that let your computer connect to the internet in a sustained way at all times through your cable box, with speeds orders of magnitude faster than dial-up. And that meant that users no longer needed AOL to dial into. The company wanted to strike a deal with cable companies to become a broadband provider too, but the cable companies were skeptical. They looked at AOL, this company that had spent the better part of a decade and running around them entirely, and thought, "Why should we help you guys?"

• 28:43Speaker 02

  They felt burned by AOL.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Plus, a lot was happening outside of AOL's walled garden. Free services let people build their own websites, and with just enough HTML, people were making homepages about their dogs, their bands, their favorite TV shows, with blinking text and guestbooks. People no longer needed to walk through AOL's doorway to get onto the internet, and they no longer wanted to stay inside its walls.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  The arrival of broadband coincided with another event that was equally as harmful to AOL: the burst of the dot-com bubble. Many internet companies at the time weren't actually making much money, but their stock prices were sky-high. For example, even though AOL bought Time Warner, Time Warner had five times the revenue of AOL. But when the bubble burst, it caused a cascade of failures in the tech industry that hit AOL hard. You see, aside from subscriptions, AOL's primary revenue stream is advertising, and a huge part of their ad buys came from companies that were propped up by the bubble.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  The stock dropped like a rock, and all of our compensation was heavily weighted towards options. Everyone had options in that company. The assistants, the janitorial staff, you know, everyone that was an employee had stock. That was a big thing.

• 30:06Speaker 01

  Jan described emotional days in the office. Everyone watching the stocks tank in real time, and with it, their retirement savings, their futures.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  I think it also aggravated the relationship between Time Warner and AOL, because their pensions or their retirement stuff became more tied to AOL's stock.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  And this brings us to the last problem, a problem that was ironically supposed to be AOL's greatest triumph: the purchase of Time Warner. At the time, Time Warner owned HBO, CNN, DC Comics, and much more. And it seemed like a great idea to merge one of the biggest old media companies in the world with the biggest new media company in the world. Time Warner had already spent millions on an ill-conceived online presence that went nowhere, and AOL was trying to remain a walled garden on an internet that was rapidly opening up. So it felt like a perfect union. Time Warner puts its premium content on AOL. AOL gets more signups in the form of people looking for exclusive Time Warner content. The problem is that no one from either camp really had any vision for how this would work.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  It was a little bit like oil and water to begin with. And, you know, it didn't, it was not a happy time.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Was it immediately apparent that like the relationship between AOL and Time Warner would be a rocky one? Or did it sort of creep? Was it a kind of death by a thousand cuts kind of situation?

• 31:36Speaker 02

  It was probably death by 10 cuts.

• 31:38Speaker 01

  So not, not quite 1,000.

• 31:44Speaker 02

  I think there were a lot of people on the Time Warner's side who didn't like this upstart coming in. But I think that there was hostility, and I think it was also different personality types. Just think, you know, you're this big company, New York City-based, suit and tie, et cetera, expensive artwork all over the place. And, you know, we come in in jeans and sneakers, you know?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Right. In the end, these two companies had no vision for how to integrate and just didn't really understand one another. On top of the fact that it came out later that AOL had fudged some of its ad revenue numbers to make the merger more profitable, and eight executives ended up having to pay millions in fines to the SEC, which was nothing compared to the actual losses the company accrued. In 2003, AOL posted a nearly $99 billion loss. At the time, the largest corporate loss in history. CEO Steve Case, the man who hired Jan Brant, resigned. In 2005, Jan herself resigned her position.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And the following year, the company unceremoniously ended the disk campaign. People have called this the worst deal in history, but others have gone further. Ted Turner was the largest individual shareholder in the company. He personally lost about $8 billion. And he told The New York Times, quote, "The Time Warner AOL merger should pass into history like the Vietnam War and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. It's one of the biggest disasters that have occurred to our country." AOL was spun off from Time Warner in 2009 and tried to reinvent itself as a media company. It bought The Huffington Post, TechCrunch, a stack of other websites.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  And if you think about it, it's kind of the old strategy all over again. AOL makes content, you come to consume it. But now, it was just one company among many. It was bought by Verizon, smashed together with Yahoo, sold to a private equity firm. And just this year, AOL was bought by an Italian tech conglomerate for $1.5 billion, less than 1% of what Wall Street once said it was worth. I've thought a lot about this epic rise and fall, about how the same company could succeed so spectacularly in bringing Americans to the internet and then fail so spectacularly at keeping them on their service. I think the reason behind this is that AOL understood only half of what the internet was. The half they got right starts with the disk in the mailbox.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  It was an invitation, something physical, something analog, something you understood that could connect you with something you didn't. This was Jan's genius. And once you got inside, they understood what you'd really come for, which was each other. People didn't sign into AOL for the news articles so much as to email their cousin, to sit in chat rooms with strangers till 2:00 AM, to write an away message that was secretly meant for just one person. AOL bet that the internet was essentially social, and they were right. You can still feel this in the architecture of the internet today. Reddit is just a large-scale version of forums. Discord is just a private chatroom. 30 years later, the thing that keeps us online is the thing that AOL first sold us:

• 35:06Speaker 01

  the ability to find each other. It's the other half they got wrong. AOL thought people wanted a curated menu of content, picked and produced by professionals. But the internet is most alluring and addictive when it's open and chaotic and a little out of control. That's why the companies that ended up running the internet mostly provided the infrastructure. They built the stages, and we filled them. As I was writing this story, another massive corporate merger is front-page news. And again, in this case, one half of the merger is Warner Brothers, this time being consumed by Paramount Skydance, an $81 billion merger that's owned in part by the Ellison's

• 35:51Speaker 01

  and American Business Dynasty and the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Abu Dhabi. What we do know are deal dollar amounts, ownership stakes, and the seeming ideological shift at CBS under the Ellison stewardship. We know that this merger could result in an estimated 4,500 layoffs, and that thousands of actors, filmmakers, and industry professionals have signed an open letter opposing the merger as anti-competitive. What we don't know is who this benefits, what it's all for. But if the AOL-Time Warner merger taught us anything, it's that the size of the deal is no evidence that it actually makes any sense.

• 36:42Roman Mars?

  The great Alex Goldman was the co-host of the award-winning Reply All podcast. He now hosts a new show called Hyperfixed, where he solves problems that listeners write to him about. You can find it online where you get your podcasts or at hyperfixpod.com. They're also on social media everywhere at Hyperfixed Pod.

• 37:11Roman Mars?

  A History of the United States in 100 Objects is a production of 99% Invisible and BBC Studios. It's hosted and curated by me, Roman Mars. This episode was produced by Alex Goldman. Our series producers are Priscilla Alabie, Brenna Daldorf, and Ellie Lightfoot. Our associate producer is Isaac Fisher. This series was edited by Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Mixing by Charlie Brandon King. Fact-checking by Amy Bracken. Our theme song is by Swan Real. From 99% Invisible, our executive producer is Kathy Tu. From BBC Studios, our executive producers are Annie Brown and Courtney Harrell. Our production coordinator is Shan Pelé, and the production manager is Mabel Finnegan-Wright.

• 37:55Roman Mars?

  Artwork by Stefan Lawrence. 99% Invisible is part of the SiriusXM Podcast family headquartered in beautiful, uptown, Oakland, California. And BBC Studios is headquartered in beautiful, white city, West London. If you want to get in touch or have an object for us to consider, email us at [email protected].

• 38:33Speaker 06

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• 39:03Speaker 04

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• 39:32Roman Mars?

  This fall, LL Bean is celebrating the moments people look forward to all year: the first school drop-off, the first sweater weather day, and the first chilly evening around the fire pit. For over 100 years, LL Bean has been part of these traditions: crunching leaves in Maine-made bean boots, cheering from the sidelines in Scotch plaid flannel, and walking the dog in a rugged field coat. So grab the layers and people you love and get outside. Visit llbean.com to shop the fall collection. LL Bean: Be an Outsider.