How Much Did It Cost AOL To Send Us Those CDs In The 90s? A Lot!, Says Steve Case

Like most little kids, I used to love getting things in the mail. And in the 1990s, I was lucky enough to get something new every single day. Sadly, 99.9 percent of those were install discs from AOL. If you lived in the United States in the 1990s, you remember these. They started as 3.5-inch floppies and transitioned into CDs. And I'm not exaggerating. I got one just about every single day. You've got mail, indeed. If nothing else, it was ingenious marketing for AOL. While people eventually started bitching about getting spammed by the discs, most of those people probably also installed them at least once and checked out the service. So how much did that cost AOL? "A lot," says CEO at the time, Steve Case. Case himself took to Quora recently to answer the question: How much did it cost AOL to distribute all those CDs back in the 1990's?

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AOL - Wikipedia

Are there any AOLers still floating around out there? The internet coming of age was our time. : r/GenX

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TIL when AOL 4.0 launched in 1998 they used the entire world's CD production market for several weeks. No other major market CDs were created during this period of time. : r/todayilearned

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Steve Case

Ultimate Dance Party 1997 by Various Artists (CD, Nov-1996, Arista) 78221894326

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