AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL, stylized as "Aol.", and previously known as America Online) is an American global Internet services and media company.[3][4] AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York.[5][6] Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services.[7]
AOL is best known for its online software suite, also called AOL, that allowed customers to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the Internet as a whole. At its prime, AOL's membership was over 30 million members worldwide,[8] most of whom accessed the AOL service through the AOL software suite.
On May 28, 2009, Time Warner announced that it would spin off AOL into a separate public company. The spinoff occurred on December 9, 2009,[9] ending the eight year relationship between the two companies.[10]

When you establish a market-research study for your business, follow these basic guidelines:

Use the right sample. The research sample — your study’s group of participants — has to be just the right size. Too large a sample is not cost effective, and too small a sample offers inaccurate results. You also need to have the right samples from your overall population. Even a sample as small as one percent of a market or group will work, as long as the sample truly reflects the overall geographic area or population that you want to query.
Mirror the market. Your surveys must reflect all characteristics of the market from which it is drawn, such as geographical area or population segment. Nielsen TV ratings are based on very small samplings of the overall audience, but they're accurate to a few percentage points. For example, if half of your target market is aged 65 and older and half is 30 and younger, make sure that the sample size accurately reflects this demographic. If one-third of your market lives in one town and two-thirds lives in another, your survey must reflect the geographic split in order to give you accurate and useful information.
Get quantifiable results. Successful studies follow proven approaches based on statistics and sampling. But don’t worry — you don't need a PhD in mathematics. Most results can be tabulated with simple arithmetic and broken down into percentages that anyone can understand.

Businesspeople understand that not all customers are created equal—the 80-20 rule suggests that over time a small percentage of a company's customer base can generate a high percentage of its sales and profit. Models for calculating customer lifetime value are built on just such a premise.

But new research is starting to look at customers whose value is not as readily apparent, and where CLV calculations break down. In a recent working paper, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta calls them "free" customers—think of buyers at an auction. Traditionally auction houses make most of their profit from fees paid by sellers; buyers don't pay fees. So although buyers are a necessary ingredient to the deal—no buyers, no sellers—their value is more difficult to quantify. To the auction house, is one buyer worth four sellers? Is one buyer worth one seller?

The answer is critical for the auction house, which must determine how to allocate marketing and other expenditures between buyers and sellers to attract new business.

As more job seekers sign on to Monster.com, more employers are willing to be paying customers for the firm.
Gupta's work provides a model for determining this value and is related to research being done by colleague Andrei Hagiu and others into the dynamics of multi-sided markets: platforms that serve two or more distinct groups of customers who value each other's participation. Just how that participation is valued is a question Gupta's research begins to answer.

Sarah Jane Gilbert: Why do traditional customer lifetime value formulas break down in a networked setting, and how does your model address those shortcomings?

Sunil Gupta: Traditional models of CLV estimate a customer's profit potential based on the purchase behavior of an individual customer. These models completely ignore the interaction among customers.

Consider a firm such as eBay that has two sets of customers—buyers and sellers. EBay generates almost all its profits from sellers through commissions and listing fees. Buyers do not provide any direct profit to the firm. However, without buyers, the firm would have no sellers and vice versa. This kind of situation, which is called a two-sided market, is common in many industries such as real estate and employment services.

A traditional model of CLV will not be able to estimate the worth of a buyer. In our paper we address exactly this question. We create a model which captures these "indirect network effects" where more buyers potentially attract more sellers and vice versa.
 

jamescord

MP Guru
AOL Inc. (NYSE: AOL, stylized as "Aol.", and previously known as America Online) is an American global Internet services and media company.[3][4] AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York.[5][6] Founded in 1983 as Control Video Corporation, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services.[7]
AOL is best known for its online software suite, also called AOL, that allowed customers to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the Internet as a whole. At its prime, AOL's membership was over 30 million members worldwide,[8] most of whom accessed the AOL service through the AOL software suite.
On May 28, 2009, Time Warner announced that it would spin off AOL into a separate public company. The spinoff occurred on December 9, 2009,[9] ending the eight year relationship between the two companies.[10]

When you establish a market-research study for your business, follow these basic guidelines:

Use the right sample. The research sample — your study’s group of participants — has to be just the right size. Too large a sample is not cost effective, and too small a sample offers inaccurate results. You also need to have the right samples from your overall population. Even a sample as small as one percent of a market or group will work, as long as the sample truly reflects the overall geographic area or population that you want to query.
Mirror the market. Your surveys must reflect all characteristics of the market from which it is drawn, such as geographical area or population segment. Nielsen TV ratings are based on very small samplings of the overall audience, but they're accurate to a few percentage points. For example, if half of your target market is aged 65 and older and half is 30 and younger, make sure that the sample size accurately reflects this demographic. If one-third of your market lives in one town and two-thirds lives in another, your survey must reflect the geographic split in order to give you accurate and useful information.
Get quantifiable results. Successful studies follow proven approaches based on statistics and sampling. But don’t worry — you don't need a PhD in mathematics. Most results can be tabulated with simple arithmetic and broken down into percentages that anyone can understand.

Businesspeople understand that not all customers are created equal—the 80-20 rule suggests that over time a small percentage of a company's customer base can generate a high percentage of its sales and profit. Models for calculating customer lifetime value are built on just such a premise.

But new research is starting to look at customers whose value is not as readily apparent, and where CLV calculations break down. In a recent working paper, Harvard Business School professor Sunil Gupta calls them "free" customers—think of buyers at an auction. Traditionally auction houses make most of their profit from fees paid by sellers; buyers don't pay fees. So although buyers are a necessary ingredient to the deal—no buyers, no sellers—their value is more difficult to quantify. To the auction house, is one buyer worth four sellers? Is one buyer worth one seller?

The answer is critical for the auction house, which must determine how to allocate marketing and other expenditures between buyers and sellers to attract new business.

As more job seekers sign on to Monster.com, more employers are willing to be paying customers for the firm.
Gupta's work provides a model for determining this value and is related to research being done by colleague Andrei Hagiu and others into the dynamics of multi-sided markets: platforms that serve two or more distinct groups of customers who value each other's participation. Just how that participation is valued is a question Gupta's research begins to answer.

Sarah Jane Gilbert: Why do traditional customer lifetime value formulas break down in a networked setting, and how does your model address those shortcomings?

Sunil Gupta: Traditional models of CLV estimate a customer's profit potential based on the purchase behavior of an individual customer. These models completely ignore the interaction among customers.

Consider a firm such as eBay that has two sets of customers—buyers and sellers. EBay generates almost all its profits from sellers through commissions and listing fees. Buyers do not provide any direct profit to the firm. However, without buyers, the firm would have no sellers and vice versa. This kind of situation, which is called a two-sided market, is common in many industries such as real estate and employment services.

A traditional model of CLV will not be able to estimate the worth of a buyer. In our paper we address exactly this question. We create a model which captures these "indirect network effects" where more buyers potentially attract more sellers and vice versa.

hello netra,

I also got some information on the Study on Investor Presentation AOL, Inc. and would like to share it with you and other student's. So please download and check it.
 

Attachments

  • Study on Investor Presentation AOL, Inc..pdf
    3.4 MB · Views: 0
Top