AOL’s fortunes in its original business of consumer internet provision and online/search engine marketing have undoubtedly flagged over the years, as the once dominant internet provider found itself replaced by new ISP’s and the growth of third-party search engines.

Now it seems that AOL hopes to make itself a key player in the media industry and become one of the most prominent online news providers, as AdAge reports that the company will make online content generation its primary business model.

In an interview with AdAge, the president of AOL’s media and studios division, David Eun said that “Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high quality content, period. The content driving our traffic is home-grown and 80% of it is now produced by folks on the AOL payroll.”

To drive this ambitious content generation strategy, AOL plans to dramatically increase the size of its editorial and journalist staff. Currently the company reportedly hires around 500 full time editorial employees – Mr Eun says this figure could double in the coming year.

Eun says that AOL will also change its relationship with contributing freelancers, increasing the numbers of freelancers it works with from the current 40,000 and building a content marketing-based payment system that measures the value of an article based on the number of people that click, how long they stay on page and the amount of ad revenue associated with the page.