Yahoo! acquires Associated Content for US$100M to take on Demand Media, AOL

The attractiveness of fast and cheap content is hard for a content-heavy site such as Yahoo! to ignore, and according to AdAdge, Yahoo! just spent US$100 million to acquire just such a provider in startup Associated Content.

For about $1-5 an article, services such as Demand Media, AOL’s SEED and Associated Content can ensure that sites with millions of webpages (like Yahoo!) have something to fill them with. AOL’s CEO was actually an investor in Associated Content, but the aging giant decided to build their own with SEED.

This is a reasonably good move for Yahoo! (although they certainly paid a premium), and goes right along with my prediction last week that Yahoo! is far from done. This should allow them to lower costs over the long run while continuing to produce lots of content.

Here’s what AdAdge has to say about Associated Content:

Founded by Luke Beatty in 2004, Associated Content receives more than 16 million unique users per month, according to ComScore, and the editorial staff reviews more than 50,000 pieces of content per month, according to the company. Associated manages a network of freelancers, but also built underlying technology that predicts what kinds of content consumers want, as well as surfacing that content through natural search on engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing so the library makes money over time.

Associated has also signed deals with major media publishers, such as Thomson Reuters, Cox Newspapers, Hachette Filipacchi and USA Today as they look for low-cost content beyond news to serve their audiences. Associated claims 380,000 contributors writing on a range of topics, from retirement planning to dealing with pregnancy neck pain.

Image credit (still one of the funniest pictures ever in tech)