I have been with AOL for many, many years. Needless to say, I know you got a lot of flack for shutting down AOL's chat rooms and removing the messengers so all it is, is a news and email server and nothing more. However, here is an idea to make AOL extremely profitable again.

Restart the chat rooms the way it used to be, before it was closed down.

However, you could do an "AOL Premium" as well. For the premium price, depending on the level people pay for, they could get certain perks.

For the lowest monthly premium, they'd simply have the ads removed from the chat rooms. For the second tier they get the ads removed, plus a basic ability to make profile pages, nothing fancy, however.

For the highest tier, they would get the ads removed, the ability to make much fancier pages, plus exclusive use of "gold rooms" where those who pay the highest tier would get access to both the regular chats and premium chats, plus fancier profiles and whatever other perks you would choose.

In this way, you would ensure that people WOULD, in fact, pay for AOL and use the service again as an integrated system which people truly loved. You would be able to out-compete servers like Discord, and you would see people coming back to America On Line in droves.

The reason people would be willing to pay for it is because they would WANT the extras like having profiles and having the ads removed from the chat rooms. I do hope you take this suggestion seriously. Because there are many gamers, like myself, who sorely miss using AOL's chats and Instant messenger services.