On Tue, 14 Aug 2001 Jim Henderson <jim.henderson@xxxxxxxx> writes: >>>>Whatever the method of providing it, E-mail costs them a trifle, and may >>>>even be making a small profit...<<<< Hi Jim, and All, They didn't make a profit in their first couple years of existence when all their only service was free e-mail. Juno lost well over $100 million before they even opened their doors to Internet Access, much less their foray into Free Internet Access. And that was back when advertising dollars was on the rise. Where they, and I think most of the Free ISPs missed the boat was in trying to be the second AOL. Juno spent outrageous sums of money trying to attract customers... spending well over a hundred dollars per new subscriber in marketing costs throughout most of their history. And with each new subscriber, greater losses. Why at least one of these bigger names wouldn't try to get, say, 500,000 of those subscribers into a profit making mode and quit wasting those huge piles of marketing dollars I'll never understand... but they insisted on trying to make up for losses on each individual account through increased volume! >>>>I hope my mail will not be cut off. Or perhaps more precisely, I wish.<<<< Going to be a sad day, and a huge, huge, HUGE loss in subscriber numbers if they do cut off the "Free E-mail accounts"... and between them, Juno and Netzero "claiming" to be the Number 2 sized ISP after the merger will collapse like a house of cards... that claim will last about a week if they cut off all the folks hanging around both of these services for their e-mail. George Lunt ..... so. cal. To unsubscribe, send a message to listar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe juno_accmail" in the body or subject. OR visit http://freelists.dhs.org ~*~