AOL Desktop Still Exists in 2025… Is It a Ripoff?

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I recently found out that AOL is still selling a $7/month subscription to their desktop client. It looks like something straight out of 2006, but it's made to run on modern versions of Windows. So you already know what I had to do...

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● Music/Credits:
Background Music:
"Wish You'd Never Left", "Blue Mood", and "Hookah Bar" from the YouTube Audio Library

Outro Music: Silent Partner - Bet On It

Some materials in this video are used under Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976, which allows "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, commenting, news reporting, teaching, and research.

#MichaelMJD #AOL #Windows

Chapters:
00:00 - Intro & Overview
03:36 - Signing on...
06:00 - You've got mail!
08:34 - Settings
11:22 - "Premium Security"
14:30 - The rest of the toolbar
18:31 - Feedback forums
21:02 - Gotta go fast
22:56 - Ads, ads, and more ads
26:25 - Using without an account
29:26 - The beta release
31:34 - Outro

[jayt]

The guy who recorded "You've got mail" recently died. His name was Elwood Edwards.

[vwestlife]

"Mix toothpate with Vaseline and just watch" sounds like an idea for a future video.

[CallumDixon]

I can imagine the dev team for this in 2025. Just two senior devs who hate each other yet have worked on only this for the past 20 years in a forgotten corner

[drewnewby]

It's a scam on seniors. They forget, and still have it and the charge every month a decade later.

[ivanmaglica]

Target audience is 100% old people that are on AOL probably since before 2000.

[ciach_]

So, one sketchy thing about the AOL Shield browser is that at some point they forked it and advertised it as Netscape (which they have full rights to) just to make it an adware

[Madblaster]

Wait there's a monthly fee and you still get ads?

[IAmNotAFunguy]

RIP Elwood Edwards, the "You've got mail" voice from AOL. Passed away November 6, 2024 at age 74.

[yaziyo]

The fact that there are ads for "Depends" in the AOL mail says it all about the expected userbase.

And the irony of people on the feedback forum complaining about too many updates on software that looks like it was once used by Cleopatra as beautiful.

[Refue]

I work in a IT support company, and one of our clients CEO is very old and still uses this exact browser. It horrifies me anytime I have to troubleshoot it for him.

[kpjVideo]

I worked at a computer store and tonnssss of elderly customers used this. The funny thing is, as long as you had the installer file, you could just install it and login to their AOL account without paying for anything.

[Aaron_Bleu]

You can tell with the UI design it’s blatantly targeted for seniors who refuse the change from the 90s. In 20 years young people will probably make fun of us for still using Steam and not Globoborgon 24 or w/e they will have

[AlexTenThousand]

Welp, what's more 2004 than sending an e-mail filled with a picture of Avril Lavigne and bad art of a flip-phone from your AOL client?

[corinthian]

I went in the AOL chat rooms in 2018 I think. People were still there... I think the "Dating 60+" and "Christian Singles" rooms were the most active (with like 10 people in them). There was, amazingly, still a community of people playing hand-run trivia games which dated back I think to the 1980s and Quantum Link, but tragically I think that just ended with AOL chat and they didn't make it to the web.

So this AOL Desktop Gold did used to have the last vestiges of 2000s and even earlier AOL. It's a shame they turned it off... I liked having that relic of the truly old online world still around.

[eeveeblazelol]

my great grandfather still pays for and uses AOL on his windows 7 computer, and he still loves it

[_macrophage]

Yahoo/AOL knows what they are doing with this garbage. Every boomer I've talked to about AOL Desktop Gold believes this is the sole means of accessing their email. A lot of them didn't know they were paying monthly for this either. If anyone is still using AOL, they are minimum 60+ years old.

[kingtom]

I hope the Sonic VAs suggestion gets the Michael MJD bump.

[SockyNoob]

When I worked at Geek Squad, AOL was on a ton of old boomers' computers and told us to make sure it was still there. Same with Outlook or Bell South. This was literally 2 years ago.

[Marrianne]

My grandpa passed away a few months ago, and recently I was cleaning his house (where I still live) and I found some AOL sample discs from the 90's and early 2000s and I installed one of them just to play around with and it looked just like this....
(sadly I was really limited in what I could do without an account/subscription)

[sinni]

I remember once upon a time when you installed AOL and "signed into" their online service (opened the software), it would essentially open a VPN if you don't use their dial-up. Yes, it created a virtual network connection... As an European for me this meant that I'd have a free USA VPN (since AOLs IPs didn't come with a good GEOIP association, they just all came out to AOL, USA). This was helpful to play some online games which were geofenced to the US...