How can AOL afford to offer their AIM Instant Messenger service to non-AOL users for free?

How can AOL afford to offer their AIM Instant Messenger service to non-AOL users for free?
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1 Answer

Answer :

answer:Who knows these days… in the old days it was to permit the AOL users to chat with the non-AOL users without the AOL users having to learn to use ICQ (and therefore diminish their premium AOL experience) I think at this point, AOL/MSN/Yahoo just have to keep their services running to prevent the bad PR of cutting out the now-expected service. FWIW, video chat, file transfer, and audio chat all happen directly client-to-client. It may be more transparent on ichat (I can’t remember), but most clients pop up some scary warning when you try to directly connect.
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