Associated Content has some 350,000 contributors uploading millions of articles and videos and is growing quickly, according to Patrick Keane, CEO in this interview with Beet.TV.

Associated Content is among the first of the so called "content farm" companies which assign and pay for original, "pro-sumer" reporting on a mass scale.  

Recently we reported on Demand Media, another company which is making considerable progress in this area. Also entering this space is AOL.

Unlike Demand Media, which selects contributors and pays them a set amount per contribution, Associated Content network appears more open.  It pays them based on the performance of their content.

Most of this content on these sites is feature and informational, not generally news-driven.

We caught up with Keane, a former Googler, recently at the AlwaysOn media conference.  He will be a speaker next week the paidContent:2010 conference that we will be covering.

Andy Plesser Executive Producer