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IN THE 12 MONTHS PRECEDING April — the most recent period for which figures are available — AOL lost subscribers at a clip of 258,000 a month. That's two…hundred…fifty…eight…thousand…a…month. This company loses the equivalent of Louisville, KY every four weeks.

So what does AOL do with the subs who remain? It blatantly treats them as a commodity to be exploited — which is, after all, what they are, but does AOL have to be so stupid about it?

Last month, for the first time in its history, the Web portal began serving banner ads along with e-mail to paid subscribers. These aren't just the non-intrusive ads that people are accustomed to seeing with free services, such as Google's Gmail. Oh, no. These are big, flashing banners that take up a third of what once was message space.

An AOL spokeswoman reportedly said the company surveyed its subscribers and determined that receiving ads with e-mail wouldn't be overly upsetting to them. She also said the ads aren't targeted according to content, a supposed plus in today's privacy-wacko-controlled Internet environment.

As of this writing, sponsors include eBay and LowerMyBills.com. Is this the brand association LowerMyBills' parent, Experian, wants? Does the company really want its image conveyed as a flashing, annoying distraction while Junior scrunches up his eyes to read what little is left on the screen of Grandma's happy-birthday message?

Moreover, why deliver random mortgage ads to Junior at all?

And what about the companies paying AOL, as a result of its implementation of Goodmail's CertifiedEmail service, to ensure their commercial mail gets delivered? Will they like the idea that they're paying to have their e-mail appear with its message area drastically reduced so AOL can include banner ads aimed at diverting recipients' attention from the message and getting them to click away? Not likely.

AOL's bumbling in this incident didn't stop at cramming ads down paying subscribers' throats, either. The company also apparently failed to make its technical support staff aware of the change.

When Stefanie Pont, managing partner of marketing consultancy Pont Media Direct, noticed the ads in her e-mail account, she called AOL to complain.

“It [the ad] literally left a third of the screen to read e-mail,” she said. “I called them and got a guy on the phone who said it was a software glitch when they did the last update.”

The technical support rep showed Pont how to restore her original settings, and the ads disappeared.

However, the e-mail ads appeared in Pont's e-mail again several days later. When she called AOL tech support again, Pont said, a representative told her that AOL had begun inserting the ads in paid subscribers' e-mails without telling anyone in his department.

“The guy said, ‘We've been resetting people for two days,’” according to Pont. “He was pretty cranky. He said people had been calling him up all day telling him they were going to cancel their service.”

So much for subscribers not minding banner ads in their e-mail. And unless AOL has some secret revenue stream that doesn't involve people, this is one company that can't afford to anger its subscribers. Parent company Time Warner reported in its quarterly earnings statement that as of March 31, AOL's U.S. subscriber base was 18.6 million, down 835,000 from the previous quarter and off 3.1 million from the previous year.

Make no mistake, a significant portion of those who remain with AOL are there only because switching is a pain in the neck. Nonetheless, the company seems hell-bent on breaking its existing subscribers' inertia — the only thing keeping it in the game.

AOL, formerly America Online, should rename itself ALD — for America Leaving in Droves.