Juno Online Services

Juno was founded in May 1996 by Charles Ardai, Brian Marsh and Clifford Tse, with equity capital provided by the D. E. Shaw Group and headquarters in the same Midtown Manhattan building as Shaw. In August 1996, it began a free e-mail service — a customer would install the proprietary Juno client which would allow them to send and receive email of about 35 kilobytes in size. Version 1 did not offer attachments or other features. The user could write emails with the Juno client and would periodically sign in by dial-up. Upon doing so, the Juno client would upload any emails the user had written, download any new incoming emails in the online mailbox, and download targeted advertisements, which were displayed in the client. This was similar to "QWK" and similar less automated offline readers that had been used for years by BBSes to save phone line connect time.

In June 1998, Juno expanded its service to offer premium support for paying subscribers, and added the ability to browse the web in addition to use of email. In December 1999, Juno began to offer the same service (without technical support) for free, provided the user ran the Juno client, which displayed a bar containing advertisements for the majority of the time that the user was online. Juno later imposed limits on how much usage could be made of its free Internet service in a single month. Free service was limited, as of the middle of July 2015, to a maximum of 10 hours per month.

With the collapse of the 1990s Dot-com bubble, Internet advertising revenues declined and the company shifted emphasis to offering discount Web and mail services similar to large ISPs, but at half the price.

Juno stock began trading on NASDAQ in May 1999, under the symbol JWEB. In June 2001, Juno and NetZero, which also traded on NASDAQ but under the symbol NZRO, announced a merger. The two had been in litigation over the patent which NetZero held to provide free Internet access by using an Ad bar. Though NetZero held the said patent, Juno had six million members, and thus was far larger. Eventually, they chose to merge rather than continue to fight in court. By September 2001, the two companies were merged into the present-day United Online, and both JWEB and NZRO were delisted.

Juno released, along with NetZero, a service that purported to make web browsing faster. It displayed pictures at lower resolutions, thereby speeding page loads.

In 2001, Juno enacted a new version of their privacy policy. By continuing to use the service, customers implicitly agreed to allow Juno to harvest any unused CPU cycles. The plan was to assemble a quasi supercomputer using customers processors and sell computing services to private companies. This additional revenue was intended to keep the company afloat after the dot-com bubble. Most customers did not notice the change of terms. Though a customer for the Juno Virtual Supercomputer service was announced, it remained unclear, as of the middle of July 2015, whether the company followed through on this plan.