In the never ending battle between MSN and AOL for more online subscribers, Microsoft said on tuesday that it added some three-quarters of a million net subscribers to its MSN Internet access service in its last quarter, bringing the total to 7.7 million customers. It also attracted an additional quarter of a million subscribers to it"s other pay services, mostly users of extra storage in Hotmail e-mail accounts.
MSN Vice President Yusuf Mehdim said that growth in access subscribers was powered by the release of software and network make-over, and by an offer aimed at drawing subscribers away from rival AOL access service. "We are very directly taking share away from AOL Time Warner," Mehdi said.
However, even with its strong growth, MSN still lags far behind AOL"s popular service, which has some 33 million subscribers.
"We have just finished another tremendously successful quarter for subscriptions, in which we added more than 1.9 million new members and raised our total to 6.5 million new members for the year (2001)," an AOL spokesman said. "There continues to be no comparison."