In Honor of AOL's Purchase of HuffPo for $315 Million I'm Reducing My AOL Bill by 60%

After hearing that AOL is paying $315 million for lefty blog site Huffington Post and putting Ariana Huffington in charge of AOL's news pages, I decided it was time to take another look at my monthly AOL expense.  I've been a member of AOL since May, 1995.  I wasn't the first, but I was a pretty early member of that service.

I don't remember how much it cost back then, but at the highpoint I think it was up to $23.99 per month.  Then, thanks to competition and declining membership, AOL completely revamped their pricing and basically began giving it away for free.  Or, for some of us who chose to do so, you could pay a marginal amount to maintain your virus protection and still have AOL available via dial-up if high speed internet was unavailable.  I think that started out at $9.99, but recently rose to $11.99.

Now that I have a smartphone the prospect of being without high speed internet isn't such a big deal, so this morning I looked at the pricing again and chose the $4.99 plan that keeps my virus software up-to-date.  I actually began migrating a lot of my regular email to Gmail a few weeks ago when I found it worked better on my Android phone, and I'd probably dump AOL altogether if my family didn't have all their accounts under mine.

I've rarely ever used AOL News for blog material, and will be even less likely to now that it's being managed by Huffington.  AOL News has been pretty evenhanded for the most part, though I do remember taking them to task when Cindy Sheehan first came on the scene in 2005.  I can imagine that every lefty talking point will now become a headline on AOL.