Occasionally I hear complaints from people on dial up saying things like… “I’m on dial up and can’t see your videos. You should think about us dial up users and make this available in other formats”.
Their complaints are totally valid, but is it really worth your time to worry about these dial up users?
Sometimes people live in remote places where they have no other options, but this is rare. I’m not sure about the exact amount of people using a dial up connection, but my Google Analytics sure gives me a good idea about my own user base. 
In this picture I’ve attached the stats for my blog visitors this month. Notice that dial up users only make up about 1% of all the viewers.
Of course there are 3056 viewers that we have no idea what they are using but it’s safe to say that the majority of those aren’t dial up users either.
The point here is that yes it is nice to be able to cater to dial up users but doing so is probably not that profitable in most instances. Many of these users have already displayed a lack of catching up with the times, and probably aren’t in a very cash flush situation. (I know this isn’t always true, but more times than not it is).
Also, these dial up users are probably going to take up more customer support time than others as they are going to have download and viewing problems more so than someone with cable or dsl.
So is it really worth it to worry about dial up users?
I don’t lose any sleep over it. Maybe I’m being narrow minded but it seems like a waste of time and effort to optimize all my stuff just so a guy on a Commodore 64 in the middle of BFE can see my stuff.
What’s your opinion? Do you focus much time of catering to dial up users and is it really a profitable thing to do?
Honestly, I don’t spend any time catering to dial up users.
Like you said, there’s more customer support, there’s not that many of them, and I just don’t think it’s an efficient use of my time.
I cater to my ideal customer. Just like when I write copy I’m not trying to please everyone, just my ideal customer. And my ideal customer is not on dial up so I don’t even think about it.
I admit like you that I might be narrow minded about the subject, but I don’t lose any sleep over it.
Shawn
I always try to optimize images and code to speed things up, but there is such a low percentage of dial up users that I can’t see a huge return on catering to them.
Summarizing the videos in text format would however be beneficial to the search engines.
Where i live in Hooterville,we just got dsl 3 years ago. Theres always Satalite,as I have Direct Tv.and theres talks of them going internet!
I dont know any one on dial up? Do you personally?
If I was scoping the interwebs on my Commodore 64 I’d be too busy playing “JumpMan” to worry about making money. I loved that game.
Great article JMo. I hope you don’t loose all your dial-up readers now. 🙂
Maybe you should have promoted a cable upgrade option as an affiliate.
Smart thinking!
This is good. I am having a dilemma with knowing ISP’s do offer high speed for around the same price as Dial-up (POTS), and seeing the opinion of people who use the computer just enough to have one, but still not use spell-check, say not to concern yourself about DU users.
Satalite – Satellite
loose is what you do wif da dawg. “Satan’s ready boys! Turn loose the dawg!”
LOSE is what you find missing from your pocket, dryer, or what happens when you bet on the wrong team.
Mind, the word (lose) is used correctly in the first comment.