Should You Worry About Dial Up Users?
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?
