A steep drop in subscriber growth at America Online, a unit of AOL Time Warner Inc, may in part reflect a halt in promotions that inflated its numbers in the past, the Wall Street Journal said on Friday. AOL, the largest U.S. Internet service, started selling limited-use Internet accounts in 2000 to marketing partners such as Target Corp., Sears, Roebuck and Co. and J.C. Penney Co., the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the situation. AOL sold the accounts, which the companies then offered to their employees, in bulk for as little as $1 to $3 a month per subscriber, the Journal said.

Normal limited-usage accounts sold for about $10 per month at that time and a regular subscription cost just over $20 per month. AOL had proposed similar arrangements to several industry-leading U.S. companies, the paper said. It is not clear how many discounted subscriptions were offered or activated, but sources told the Wall Street Journal that AOL gained at least 830,000 subscribers, mostly in 2001 and 2002, through such sales. That amounted to 16.7 percent of its subscriber growth in the period.