SAI’s got the AOL masterplan, with the Town concept and how the old dial-up company is to be the new media giant 2.0, in a leaked 58 page presentation. AOL’s calling it The AOL Way and it shows an extremely harsh way of looking at content, with pageview goals and SEO tools to further improve the content’s search engine rankings. Writing for search engines isn’t anything new of course, but AOL desperately needs its brands to stand on their own, not be reliant on traffic from the AOL homepage.

All this isn’t news. The Town concept have been known for some time, and the fact that AOL is ramping up on content isn’t new either. But the way it is presented, cold and down to numbers, is both refreshing and scary at the same time.

Will AOL pull it off?

I doubt it.