As a satisfied user of Time Warner's (NYSE:TWX) AOL service for the past dozen years, this week's news that the country's leading online service has made great strides in eradicating spam isn't lost on me.
AOL's spam filter is good -- perhaps too good given the amount of legitimate correspondence that I have to fish back out of the spam folder -- and it certainly has made going online a much more pleasant experience. I remember how embarrassed I used to feel as an AOL subscriber when I had to resort to the free email services of Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), and now Google (NASDAQ:GOOG), because they were giving away features you couldn't get as a paying AOL member. That's no longer the case, for the most part.
Yet the company's press release, touting its breakthroughs, was flawed in several ways. As Fool Alyce Lomax pointed out on Tuesday, with the government cracking down on spamsters, it's a pretty safe bet that trying to misspell words such as Viagra and refinance to get past email filters is probably not just a passing trend on AOL.
But what really bugs me is how America Online went about presenting its data. It points to the number of emails sent to its members -- down daily from 2.1 billion to just 1.6 billion over the past year. According to the release, "AOL believes this 22% drop in attempted emails to be almost entirely spam."
Excuse me? Almost entirely? Shouldn't they be honest and factor in their shrinking subscriber count? There are now 22.7 million subscribers -- 2 million fewer than were signed up a year ago. You can't just present raw data and ignore that 8% reduction in the number of users who receive email on AOL.
If you work the math, it's still impressive. AOL members were apparently receiving an average of 85 emails a day a year ago, compared with roughly 70 pieces today. Hey, that's a notable 18% decline, especially with so much of that being unsolicited inbox litter. Why not present it that way? It wouldn't have been deceptive, and AOL wouldn't have had to face the cynics shrugging off the news because of the defections that have to be factored into the equation.
Yet that statistic, as presented, would seem to conflict with the company's claim that because there are 75% fewer complaints, spam is down sharply. Again, here is another point that AOL tried to slide by press-release-reading buffs. No other gauge presented in the release indicated headway as dramatic as this, and there's a good reason for that. The "Report Spam" button wasn't a prominent feature until just a couple of years ago. It may have been just a novelty at the time. Now, though, it could be the psychological factor that with the rollout of spam folders that work -- and they do -- folks are less inclined to report spam because they now know that AOL will get around to handling it.
AOL does have a really good product these days.
Still, Earth to AOL: If you're going to shout it from the rooftops, please, make sure those sugarcoated press releases are cynic-proof in the future.
Have AOL's advances in spam kept you on as a subscriber? Will it be enough to start growing its user base again? What should Time Warner do with AOL? All this and more -- in the Time Warner discussion board. Only on Fool.com.
Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz really has been an AOL subscriber since the early 1990s. He does not own shares in any of the companies mentioned in this story. He is also part of the Rule Breakers newsletter research team, seeking out tomorrow's ultimate growth stocks a day early.
