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Just six months after joining AOL as Head of Strategic Patnerships, content expert Luke Beatty was promoted to Head of Product last week. Beatty, who spent five years at TechStars Boulder and still resides in Denver, is stepping up at exactly the right time: AOL just acquired LA-based content personalization company Gravity for $90 million.

Now, the Internet giant is looking to Beatty because he knows a thing or two about content: he founded crowdsourcing content platform Associated Content in 2004 out of Denver (with eventual financial backing from Tim Armstrong of AOL). Beatty served as Associated Content’s CEO until it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2010 - for, you guessed it, $90 million.

Now, Beatty will be helping AOL to aggressively ramp up its content personalization by utilizing Gravity’s technologies such as its flagship Interest Graph product.

“It’s a matter of dynamically creating a page for every user,” Beatty said. “The next generation is about dynamic page design.”

In contrast to manual page programming that displays the same content for all site visitors, dynamic page design reflects users’ preferences based on demographics and previous clicks. Gravity will be propelling AOL and its brands to compete with other sites making moves in the content personalization space, Beatty said pointing to Amazon and Yahoo! as examples.

AOL is just one customer of Gravity - and rightly so, because they now own them. But Gravity’s potential to “personalize everything on the Internet” through its 200 million Interest Graphs has led it to gain other customers such as Gap, Intel and Sony. AOL, with properties such as the Huffington Post, TechCrunch and Patch under its umbrella, will be using Gravity’s amazing power to become the “world’s premier creator of high-end content,” Beatty said.

Beatty isn’t just an advocate for premium, personalized content for AOL though: true to his TechStars days, he said he urges digital startups to find “essential voice” in their own content, too. 

“If you’re just talking about things that other people are talking about, if you can live without it, if it’s just SEO or non-essential… then it’s really hard to build a presence,” Beatty said. “But if you write or photograph or videotape really awesome content, people will find you.”