Egad. The plan behind the rumoured hostile takeover bid for Salon.com seems downright loopy. The 24-year-old spearheading the plan (who ran his own syndication company for two years until it folded last year) believes he can make Salon (SALN:Nasdaq) profitable in 30 days thanks to its brand and traffic.

How exactly might he do this? By gutting everything that makes Salon Salon and shovelling repurposed content on pages thick in ads. Besides the problems inherent in that business model, the plan also assumes:

1. at minimum 1.5 million of Salon's current 3.5 million unique visitors a month will stick around,
2. and agreements will be reached with “content partners” who themselves are struggling to fund their own site.

I'm doubtfully the “takeover” will succeed (as are many others) and in fact could just be a PR stunt to get press for his new syndication company, but if it does what would happen to the 10,000+ subscribers paying for the US$30/year premium content?