AOL’s advertising platforms, which are grouped under the Advertising.com business, is now a $500 million business, the company revealed today at its Investor Day in New York City. The Advertising.com Group is a new business unit inside AOL, which includes six separate products: The Advertising.com ad-serving network (which AOl acquired in 2004) and AdTech, along with more recent acquisitions 5Min (now AOL Video), Pictela, GoViral, and the internally built Seed product. (AOL also owns TechCrunch, but we are part of the Huffington Post Media Group).
All of that, all together is a $500 million business, which is about a quarter of AOL’s total revenue. And it’s clear that AOL thinks it can become a $1 billion business. Today was the first time AOL broke out these numbers. → Read More
AOL is buying video syndication network 5min Media, reports AllThingsD. According to Israeli news outlet YNews, this is indeed a done deal, and the price is between $50 and $65 million.
It isn’t exactly what you’d call a stellar exit for 5min’s investors, who pumped just south of $13 million into the company, but not a terrible one either. → Read More
5min has struck a deal with Dailymotion to bring 200,000 how-to videos about sports, fashion, health, travel and more to the Paris-based video sharing site. This follows 5min’s recent deal to power Answer.com’s newly launched Video Answers.
5Min is one of the largest how-to video networks, with more than 110 million video views a month and 30 million unique visitors across 800 partner sites. 5Min syndicates videos from about 1,000 online video producers, including CBS, Hearst, Scripps, and WatchMojo. → Read More
Every big publisher on the Web wants to be able to serve up ad-friendly videos, but creating them can be a pain. But there are already plenty of high-quality videos out there in every subject imaginable. With that in mind, Answers.com has quietly launched Video Answers with about 200,000 videos from video distribution network 5min on everything from home repair and fashion tips to cars and travel.
5Min is already one of the largest video networks, with more than 110 million video views a month and 30 million unique visitors across 800 partner sites. But Answers.com will become its biggest partner by far. 5Min syndicates videos from about 1,000 online video producers, including CBS, Hearst, Scripps, and WatchMojo. Anytime one of 5Min’s videos matches a question asked on Answers.com, WikiAnswers, or ReferenceAnswers, video results will show up and they will play on the new Video Answers page. Advertising revenues will be split between Answers.com, 5Min, and the video publisher, with roughly a third going to each. → Read More
Which online video companies will get bought in 2010? Venture capitalists are desperately looking for exits while the usual suspects are sitting on more than $80 billion in cash: Microsoft ($20B), Apple ($40B), Google ($15B), Amazon ($3B), and Yahoo! ($3B) just to name the cash positions of a few potential acquirers. Theoretically, it should be a match made in heaven, but the sheer number of venture-backed video startups is staggering so when the music stops, not everyone will find a dancing partner.
Once you assess what drives companies to merge or acquire one another, however, it seems like we’re about to enter a period of mergers between video competitors and see a series of acquisitions by larger companies looking to accelerate their video strategies, with a common theme being increasing both monetization and margins.
With that in mind, let’s look at those 10 potential deals. → Read More
We recently wrote about the traction that how-to video site and producer Howcast is seeing online. But there’s another information and how-to video startup that is dominating the space: 5min. The company is a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos, both professionally produced and user-generated. The service’s video library boasts 150,000 of videos across a variety of categories (e.g. food, health, home and garden ), submitted by media companies and independent producers from around the world.
December’s comScore data shows that 5min saw 30.5 million unique viewers, ranking just below Turner Networks (30.6 million unique viewers) and just above AOL (30 million unique viewers). Google saw 136 million unique viewers and Hulu saw 44.2 million unique viewers. 5min ranks as number 14 out of 100 properties in ComScore’s video metrix, according to unique viewers. In terms of videos streamed, 5min saw 75.4 million streams which pales in comparison to Hulu’s 1 billion video streams and Google’s 13.2 billion video streams for the month of December. If 5min was ranked by streams, it would most likely rank lower on the list, as AOL and other video properties had more streams than the startup (AOL saw 210 million streams). → Read More
Instructional video site 5min, based in NYC and Israel, has raised an additional $7.5 million in a round led by Globespan Capital Partners and joined by previous investor Spark Capital, reports Israeli business news site Globes. This brings the total of capital invested in the startup, founded in 2006, to a healthy $12.8 million.
Its most recent financing round was $5 million from Spark back in November 2007, following a painful $300,000 angel round (at least it was painful for the startup’s founders) which we talked about a bit in the post covering the announcement of their first VC round.
5min is in essence a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos, both professionally produced and user-generated. → Read More
How-to site 5min is expanding beyond its roots as a video portal and has launched a syndication network for its videos called VideoSeed, which uses semantic matching to deliver relevant clips to participating sites. The platform matches keywords found on syndication partner pages and pairs them up with videos in the 5min database according to title and tag information (along with relevant ads to go with the video). Clips are all played in 5min’s specialized video player, which it launched earlier this year. → Read More
Instructional video site 5min has released a new beta version of their SmartPlayer, introducing support for text, video, and images that can be merged into a single embeddable flash widget. The site considers the player to be revolutionary, and believes that it will help set 5min apart from their numerous competitors in the instructional video space. The original SmartPlayer gave users the ability to manipulate instructional videos on the fly, allowing for frame-by-frame progress, slow motion, and zooming. The new version improves on these features by introducing ‘add-ons’, which are essentially pages of text and images with no limits on length. By including all of this data, the 5min videos have become self-contained guides that can be embedded on any website. I think that the updated player has a lot of potential. Chefs will be able to include their recipes alongside detailed videos demonstrating how to prepare a dish. And musicians will be able to include sheet music or tablature alongside their lessons – a godsend for instructors. But despite the improvements made since the first Smartplayer, 5min still has a ways to go. For one, it seems that there is no way to resize the video and attachment windows, which is a pain when there is a lot of text. There is also no way to get the ‘add-on’ field to auto-scroll, which would be key for musicians attempting to play a score along to a video. Other competitors in this crowded space include Howcast, Expert Village, and Instructables. You can check out a sample video below (you might want to make it full screen). http://www.5min.com/Embeded/2459390/How to Play Piano: Blues Scales → Read More
In February the Israel Web Tour rolls into Silicon Valley. Ninety Israeli startups applied to join the tour, and fifteen of them were selected to attend. The tour consists of a week-long conference and cultural exchange between Silicon Valley and Israeli entrepreneurs and venture capitalists. The general public is invited to parts of the show. more information is available on this website, including speakers. Participating startups include 5min, Plymedia, AllofMe, Nuconomy, ClickTale, blogTV, Sportingo, PicScout, Qoof, 8hands, Velingo, Innovid, Semingo, PageOnce and Journeys. I moderated a panel at the event last year. Highlights from that panel and the event in general are in the video below. CrunchBase Information 5min PLYmedia AllofMe ClickTale blogTV Journeys Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
Rumor has it that Israeli video startup 5Min, which has user-uploaded “how to” videos, has raised another $5 million in cash, from Spark Capital. We covered the startup recently – think YouTube with special features like slow motion to make the videos more useful. Our original profile is here, and our coverage of competitors is here. Ouch! How Not To Do An Angel Round The company previously raised $300,000 in angel funding. For those entrepreneurs who are curious about the economics of angel rounds, the details around 5min are interesting. In their case, it was ugly. An Israeli (print) magazine called Globes recently got their hands on the capitalization table of 5min and published the details. The angels ended up with nearly half the company for that $300k, leaving the three founders (the first three on the list) and all other employees to split the rest. It’s rare that this kind of information about a company is published publicly, but it shows how angels can squeeze a company if they have the negotiating leverage. CrunchBase Information 5min Information provided by CrunchBase → Read More
http://www.5min.com/Embeded/4284/Sometimes its worth taking a second look at a startup a few months after we cover their initial launch to see how things are going. We first covered Israeli startup 5min back in May. The site is a sort of YouTube for short user generated instructional videos. And there are some indications that it may be taking off. The company says 2 million videos were watched in August, and traffic is doubling month to month. The video embedded above is a good example of the kind of content that you can find on the site – short, amateur videos that might actually be very helpful to various niches of people. There are videos on scores of subjects – dog training, cooking, working out, fashion (tying a tie, coloring you hair, etc.), playing instruments, parenting, etc. More good content is added daily. And some of the videos are racking up decent view numbers, although it’s still peanuts compared to YouTube. Part of the attraction of the service is more than the sign they’ve hung on the door saying people should upload instructional videos. The player also has special controls that are made for instructional videos, including freeze frame, slow motion, accompanying storyboards, and various language subtitles. We’re keeping an eye on them to see if the growth rates and user adoption continues. In the meantime, I’ll be practicing those breakdancing moves. → Read More
The following video “How To Raise Money From VC’s” comes from 5min.com, an instructional video site we covered in May, and is currently getting a lot of attention in Israel. The video (in Hebrew with English subtitles) provides some fun advice for anyone looking at raising money from VC’s. Content aside I was just impressed at not only the quality of the video playback, but the built in support for switching subtitles on and off as well. If quality is the defining point of differentiation amongst instructional video sites, 5min has positioned itself very well. Enjoy. http://www.5min.com/Players/5minEmbedPlayer.swf → Read More
The semi-finals of the European focused Startup 2.0 contest were held in Madrid on the weekend, an event with 15 of the best/ most promising Web 2.0 startups out of an initial 300 nominees presenting. 5 startups were chosen as finalists with the final to be held in 2 weeks time. Amongst the final five was 5min, billed as a “Life Videopedia”. We’ve covered similar start ups previously, most recently SuTree, which like 5min hails from Israel. English company VideoJug also operates in the space and took $30 million in funding last week. 5min sits between the two in terms of function. SuTree is an index of external how-to content, VideoJug creates their own how-to content. 5min is more like YouTube, content is hosted on the site and is user submitted. 5min have created a video system specifically for instructional content. Video creators can add a storyboard to uploaded videos to help others better understand the content. The need to focus on particular skills in uploaded videos has not been forgotten. Video on 5min can be played in slow motion or frame by frame, and the inline player supports zooming in and out for a more up close experience. Given the interest and money in this particular niche there’s definitely something in the water. 5min presents a familiar setup to any person who has used YouTube style video sites whilst applying a number of unique features that are sure to win the hearts and minds of the DIY minion army. → Read More
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