'You've Got Mail' For Only 117 More Months

Afer studying long-term declines in newspaper circulation, Philip Meyer, the eminent professor of journalism at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a few years ago calculated that the last American newspaper will be read in September 2043.

Using that type of math, Tig Tillinghast, editor of MarketingWonk.com, last year calculated that America Online will lose its last subscriber on August 17, 2013. But based upon AOL’s latest net losses of subscriptions, he yesterday recalculated that to 2:15 p.m. on January 14, 2014. Tillinghast remarked:

At that point, it is supposed, the AOL advertising reps will begin returning the phone calls to the mid- and small-sized agencies.

John Battelle meanwhile is just sick of the whole thing:

I’m tired of the prideful, ignorant, and painfully slow death over at AOL. How can you have the largest ISP/content site in the world, at a time when the entire sector is boooming, and manage to fuck it up so masterfully? The stink is starting to rise not from AOL, but from the folks really calling the shots, the top brass at Time Warner. And that means something must give, and soon. Time Warner is starting to realize, they can’t do any better with AOL than Case and Pittman could back in 2001.

It seems to me like the Time Warner execs, who clearly are still pissed that AOL bought them in the first place, are either killing it through supremely benign neglect, or are trapped in a morass of their own pride.

Battelle calls for Time Warner to swallow its pride and spinoff AOL.

What We Do

Since 1996, the media business consulting firm of Digital Deliverance has provided publishers and broadcasters on four continents with strategic reviews and advice about how to profitably adapt to the epochal changes that computer-mediated technologies have wrought on the media environment and their industries.

Over the years, the firm’s clients have include The New York Times, News Corporation, The Irish Times of Dublin, Dagbladet of Oslo, The Mail & Guardian of Johannesburg, Advance Publications, Critical Mention, MediaNews Group, New Century Network, the Media Development Investment Fund, the National Cancer Institutes, and scores of other media firms that need to adapt to computer-mediated technologies and the rise of Individuated Media.

The managing partner of Digital Deliverance is Vin Crosbie, Adjunct Professor of postgraduate New Media Management at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communication, in upstate New York. From 2007 through 2020, he wrote and was the sole instructor of the school’s New Media Business course, a course required for students in the New Media Management master’s degree curriculuum, an elective course for Ph.D. students, and a permission-only course for selected undergraduates and graduate students.

Digital Deliverance is incorporated as a limited liability company in the U.S. state of Connecticut, where it is based in the city of Norwich, Connecticut.