Back in my early days online, AOL went from the rising upstart (behind Prodigy and CompuServe, which it later bought) to the behemoth…before the Internet wave swamped most of the pre-Internet online services. A few of the early folks with content areas and services on AOL rode the wave, kept building their audience, adapted to the Internet, and continue to thrive.
Motley Fool is the best-known example that comes to mind. However, Kim Komando is another online media entrepreneur from the early 1990s who still has a notable audience, both online and in other media. Her biggest asset, beyond her newsletters, is her weekly radio show…which is also a Fool characteristic. I don’t know radio that well, but I’ve seen a lot of folks who come from radio really thrive online, and vice versa. (Podcast, anyone?) Not sure why that is, but speculation for another time.
How do I know Komando still has an audience that matters?
Yesterday, January 20, 2007, OpenDNS was named the Komando Cool Site of the Day, with the headline “A safer way to access Web sites.” The writeup gives a basic, brief intro to DNS, and goes on to recommend OpenDNS with these words:
OpenDNS provides improvements over other DNS servers. It offers protection against phishing attacks. Plus, it will correct spelling mistakes you make when typing addresses.
Cool Site of the Day sounds very 1997, but we saw a notable surge of visitors to the website yesterday. Right on!
We saw a corresponding rise in support requests, too. Because of the size of Komando’s audience, and her early & heavy exposure on AOL, there are several newsletter subscribers still on AOL and other dial-up providers. That highlights our need to keep explaining DNS, and why a better DNS matters, even as we focus on features for the tech-savvy. Our business can grow nicely with both audiences, fortunately.
This is also a reminder to me that delivery matters. Yes, I’m an RSS fiend, but I didn’t give up email newsletters. All those who have yet to adopt RSS are still reading email newsletters regularly, even in a world where inboxes are never empty and spam/phish/junk are a fact of life. A trusted newsletter is a tremendous asset. Keep your content and frequency below the annoyance threshold, and it’s easier to delete the ones you don’t want than to unsubscribe.