From very early on, despite the company’s wholesome, mainstream image, AOL’s killer app has been, ahem… sex chats (and, more recently, sex Instant Messaging). Sure, AOL offers news features and e-mail delivery. But what sets it apart from sites with similar services? Its huge chat-room population of people who need people. Log on anytime, midday or midnight, and you’ll find someone who wants to chat. About sex.
No matter the putative topic (TV, movies, Limp Bizkit), most AOL chat rooms inevitably devolve from banal small talk into cheesy pickup lines, and from there into paired-off Instant Message tete-a-tetes and exchanges of lewd digital photos. Okay, bit of an exaggeration. But it’s true that even in innocent-seeming teen chat rooms, lots of kids are looking for verbal romance, however fresh-faced and chaste. (Or not so chaste: a recent visit to a Britney Spears fan room found, within three seconds of entering the room, someone posting a link to the “Upskirt Teenies” porn site.) There are rooms for chats on health and art and such. But for the most part, AOL is an enormous singles bar that doesn’t card, charges an hourly cover and occasionally turns into a busy signal.
AOL keeps fairly mum about this dirty little secret. To its credit, the company offers filters for parents to block unmonitored chats from kids. But any savvy moppet can find her way to porn chats if she wants to. And once the conversation retreats from chat rooms to Instant Messaging (“IM me”), all bets are off. Something to consider, as technology makes it easier to send and receive audio and video.
Will AOL’s core business change now that it can provide fantastic Time Warner content like People and “Eyes Wide Shut”? Don’t bet on it. You can find content in lots of places. To hold together an online village, you still need chat–it’s what keeps ’em coming back. Don’t believe us? Let’s chat about it in the “Media” room–where everyone else is already trading pics and looking for 22f’s.
