AOL Adding Ads to Subscribers’ Email

In a move to increase its appeal to advertisers, AOL is displaying ads along with email messages to paying customers using AOL 9 software.

The Internet game seems to be all about the pursuit of online advertising dollars these days, and venerable online service AOL has made a major move to increase the number of ads it delivers on behalf of advertisers: beginning in May, AOL began inserting banner ads into email messages received by its paying customers.

It’s not unusual for free Web-based email services (GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, etc.) to support their services through advertising embedded in email messages to its users (although the business model was controversial “back in the day”). If users don’t want to receive the advertisements, they can generally opt out by converting from free service to paid plans.

AOL’s move is one of the first major providers to embed advertising in messages to paying subscribers. Banner advertisements are being displayed to subscribers using version 9.0 of AOL’s proprietary access software (currently available for Windows). According to AOL, the contents of the advertisements are not being based upon content of subscribers’ email messages (unlike Google’s GMail, which in a creepy Big Brother-like fashion selects ads based in part on the contents of users email messages). However, there’s no way for users to disable the inline advertising. According to AOL, they surveyed subscribers before implementing the change, and found that most wouldn’t mind banner ads in their email messages.

(Which might say something about AOL subscribers.)

Over the last year AOL has increasingly been trying to convert itself to a Web portal site accessible by the entire Internet user community, rather than a so-called “walled garden” whose users are tied into the AOL service by proprietary access software. The inline email advertising affects only AOL users inside AOL’s service: the fact the news took weeks to sneak out of AOL’s insular service may be an indication of how few users are still locked into AOL’s traditional offerings