Shortly after Tim Armstrong took over as chief executive of AOL, he asked to see the list of business deals that were being negotiated. He saw 900 of them.

It was too many by far. “If you looked through the deal sheet, would you have been able to see the strategy of the company?” he asked. “I had a hard time.”

The deals were small and incremental. At best, he said, “you would have thought it was a small- to medium-size Internet company.”

Mr. Armstrong wants AOL to think big again. Three months after leaving a senior job as Google’s president of advertising sales, he is formulating his ambitious recovery plan for AOL. He wants to make AOL the biggest creator of premium content on the Web and the largest seller of online display advertising.

Mr. Armstrong plans to outline his five-point strategy on Friday for the company at an all-hands meeting under a large tent on its half-empty campus near Dulles International Airport outside Washington. Beyond talking about business lines, however, Mr. Armstrong’s primary challenge is to address what he calls AOL’s “crisis of confidence.” He wants the weary and beaten-down company to grow again. Read more…

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