LEAKED: AOL's Master Plan
Two years into his tenure as AOL CEO, Tim Armstrong is stepping on the gas.By April, he wants AOL editorial to increase its stories per day from 2,000 to 15,000.He wants pageviews per story to jump from 1,500 to 7,000.He wants video stories to go from being 4% of all stories produced to 70%.
Context & Ripple Effects
Tim Armstrong is two years into a turnaround whose logic has been visible since the New York Times reported AOL's plan for a clean break in 2006 and flagged in 2007 that ad growth was vital to any remake. By December 2010 the strategy had a name internally — sources described a radical transformation meant to make AOL the king of content on the internet.
The leaked plan turns that ambition into quotas: 15,000 stories a day by April, 7,000 pageviews per story, and video at 70% of output. It rests on moves already made — the $65 million purchase of video distributor 5Min Media with Ran Harnevo installed atop the expanded offering, the September TechCrunch acquisition, and the December grab of About.me into Brad Garlinghouse's consumer group.
First-order effects
- Armstrong's April deadline puts AOL's editorial operation on a sevenfold volume target overnight, with the video quota landing directly on Ran Harnevo's team, which was built to scale on the 5Min Media library and distribution deals.
- The pageview-per-story goal of 7,000 redefines success for every AOL writer and editor around traffic economics rather than the 2,000-story baseline they were producing.
Second-order effects
- A content machine of that size changes the arithmetic in the breakup-and-merger scenario sources floated in December, in which AOL might combine with Yahoo — scale of output becomes part of what either side would be buying.
- The syndicated reaction — a ReadWriteWeb account of life inside what its author calls the AOL content farm — previews the recruiting and retention tension of asking editorial staff to produce at Demand-style volumes while the same company courts prestige acquisitions like TechCrunch.
Third-order effects
- If the quota model holds, AOL stops competing as a legacy portal and operates as an industrial content producer whose valuation rests on output volume, video share, and ad inventory — the end state implied by the December 'king of content' framing.
- The 70% video target points toward a structural shift where video distribution capacity, not text production, becomes the scarce asset that separates scaled publishers from the rest.
The trend: Legacy web portals are remaking themselves as high-volume, video-weighted content factories, and Armstrong is betting AOL's post-dial-up identity on production scale over heritage.