Tech startup of the month Associated Content Inc.

• Author: Peterson, Eric
• Position: Luke Beatty

INITIAL LIGHTBULB

After four years with Denver-based search-taxonomy firm Wand Inc., Luke Beatty struck out on his own and launched Associated Content in 2004. "The idea was that 'search' and people's fascination with search is fascination with content in the end," said Beatty, who served as dean to several charter schools before his stint with Wand. "There's a lot of e-commerce on the Web and there's a lot of traditional media on the Web. People want that information, but people are also interested in user-generated content. It resonates with them in a different way than traditional media."

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Beatty is CEO of the 16-employee Associated Content, which is headquartered in Cherry Creek but also has a business-development office in New York.

IN A NUTSHELL

Associated Content has cultivated a roster of 8,000 "content producers" who produce content--text, images, voice or video--on everything from small-business advice and comic-book collecting to health and Hollywood.

Beatty described content producers as "anybody from established media personalities to Captain Random who just happens to know a lot about a particular topic. It's not top-down, traditional media content. It's bottom-up, citizen-level content."

Associated Content utilizes a revenue-management system that evaluates each piece of submitted content and pays the producer accordingly. But most of them aren't in it for the money, said Beatty--they're in it for fun, notoriety or marketing purposes. The company's library consists of about 200,000 indexed pages and is growing by about 400 pages a day.

"We've built a library that is very deep in areas where there's online...