> That "incredibly loyal user base," as he called it, could be better served with greater investments in AOL's product and user experience, he noted.
Sure, but isn't the user base also incredibly aged, and literally dying off? They're also not very tech-savvy or likely to embrace new offerings.
If anything, it seems like the opportunity is to reclaim the old brand and try to make it a thing with Gen Alpha kids or something, via kitsch and some genuinely useful offerings (like more email storage than gmail, or something).
Some of us would have been willing to pay --- still annoyed all my members.aol.com pages were first defaced by ads (I would've paid extra to not have such) and then went away (I'd've been willing to pay a reasonable fee to keep them online).
This does however explain why a bunch of accounts I forgot to log into for a couple of years are gone.