Press Coverage
Aug 1st, 2009 by Ran
We hate to brag, but here are a few mentions of 5min in the press and blogosphere:
Tech Crunch, February 3rd, 2010 
Regardless, the data indicates that 5min, which has raised $12.8 million since its launch in 2006, is growing into the Hulu for niche content. The company has forged partnerships for branded content with Scripps, Hearst and other media companies. 5min monetizes each video with pre-roll ads, overlays, and companion banners and has a rev share with the content providers. Both publishers and advertisers who use the company’s self-serve VideoSeed product, which uses semantic technology to automatically match videos to their respective audiences. The site sees its biggest competitor as the leader in niche content, Demand Media.
The Wall Street Journal, January 28, 2010
A new partnership between video-syndication platform company 5minutes Ltd. and health magazine Prevention is betting that consumers will increasingly integrate health and lifestyle content into their daily Web use.
Prevention, which is published by Rodale Inc., is allowing venture-backed 5minutes, known as 5min, to distribute its collection of 700 health videos on topics including fitness, healthy living and lifestyle. 5min will syndicate that content across the Web using technology that enables publishers to automatically match videos with article topics.
The new relationship is aimed at increasing viewership and brand awareness for Prevention, while adding to the 12,000 video health library 5min can tap into to lure publishers and advertisers.
VC Cafe, Wednesday, December 3o, 2009 
The winner of the 2009 TechAviv competition, 5min has it all: ad hoc content creation, monetization vehicles, distribution mechanisms, a proprietary video player and perhaps most importantly, an audience of 2.3 million unique users a month.
FOX Business, Monday, December 21, 2009
5min, a media company that operates the largest video syndication platform, was named the number one video startup of 2009 in the NY Video 2009 Top Startup Competition [. . . ] 5min won top honors for its aggressive syndication platform strategy, which this year, attracted several major partners including Scripps Networks (Food Network, HGTV, and DIY Network), The Style Network, G4, For Dummies(R), Meredith Corporation (NYSE: MDP), Hachette Filipacchi (Woman’s Day, ELLE, Car & Driver), HealthCentral, Kiplinger and Britannica.
Beet.tv, Tuesday, December 08, 2009
Tancer shared some exclusive insight for New Media Minute viewers into where the online trendsetters who made Facebook, YouTube, and Flickr popular way back when are now hanging out on the Web.
Essentially, they are moving away from crowd sourced content to curated content. Some of their favorite hot spots online are 5Min.com, OVGuide, and VideoJug.com.
Fierce Online Video, December 2, 2009
Video syndication platform 5min has closed short-form syndication deals with The Style Network and G4, as well as For Dummies, and Meredith Corporation to distribute an array of how-to and instructional videos.
The company — which reaches over 300 million monthly unique visitors — already has more than 100,000 short-form videos in its library that distributes to some 350 unique websites.
The company announced on Wednesday a deal to add 100,000-plus instructional videos from the “For Dummies” website. Even before that deal, it provided videos for over 350 niche sites, through which claimed to reach over 300 million unique visitors each month.
Earth Times, November 11, 2009
Our specialty is in distributing high quality content via e-mail and we wanted to fulfill that objective with video as well,” said Scott Wolf, ArcaMax Publishing’s CEO. “Working with 5min gave us the right video player platform and access to a robust content library to offer full functionally to our site’s features through e-mail, creating an important differentiator for us.
ArcaMax Publishing, Inc., the preeminent provider of family-friendly news and fun on the Internet, and 5min, the leading syndication platform for lifestyle, knowledge and instructional videos, today announced a partnership to deliver high-quality and contextually relevant videos to targeted audiences through e-mail.
Leveraging the 5min video library of more than 100,000 lifestyle, knowledge and instructional videos, ArcaMax will add health and cooking videos to its website and 75 daily e-mail newsletters, which reach three million subscribers…“Our specialty is in distributing high quality content via e-mail and we wanted to fulfill that objective with video as well,” said Scott Wolf, ArcaMax Publishing’s CEO. “Working with 5min gave us the right video player platform and access to a robust content library to offer full functionally to our site’s features through e-mail, creating an important differentiator for us.”
Companies like Demand Media, Howcast and 5Min.com come at how-to from different directions, but what they have in common is a bet on a low-cost, high-return content model.
How-to queries are among the most popular search terms, and portals now send consumers to how-videos for the answer to such online questions.
With the startup just beginning to monetize video this year, inventory has been sold out for the last six months. This early success has been attributed to the company’s VideoSeed syndication tool, which allows site owners to add contextually relevant videos from 5min’s library to their properties to help boost revenue. Business, health, pets, sports, technology, and travel are among the other categories featured on 5min’s platform.
ReadWriteStart, October 27, 2009
5min is sharing Scripps content from sites like HGTV, the Food Network and the DIY Network and matching it to relevant 5min network partners. As of this evening HealthCentral will become a network partner with access to the content matching technology, content from 5min’s health category and streaming video advertising.
Scripps properties like HGTV and the Food Network will syndicate their video on how-to-video site 5min.
The deal calls for 5Min to show Scripps’ videos on 5Min’s network of home and food categories while 5Min will display relevant videos from its library to Scripps’ online properties. The intention of the deal is obvious: to entice advertisers looking for these specific niches to spend ad dollars on these respective sites.
All of this leads to why smart, automated video syndication is so important for the syndicated video economy to work. High-quality video is still expensive to produce so to really succeed online it needs to drive monetizable views wherever it can, not just at a single destination site. Scripps clearly understands this, and I think others are beginning to as well. Syndication platforms like 5Min’s, which allow both content providers and would-be distribution points to be easily and effectively matched, are important glue in this process, which I see only becoming more critical going forward.
Instructional-video site 5min announced on Monday that it has partnered with Scripps Networks to offer programing from the broadcast company on its site.
The partnership will start with Scripps providing hundreds of videos from its cable channels, which also include DIY Network, Fine Living Network and Great American Network.
New Tee Vee |GigaOM, October 5, 2009 
Sure, 5min is just getting started, but the company is clearly doing something right. It’s taking how-to videos, which are the closest parallel to contextually targeted cost-per-click Google text ads, and treating the videos just like text.
Read Write Web, October 4, 2009
Israeli startup and instructional video platform 5min is on a roll. Since moving to the US, the company has raised $7.5 million in Series B funding from Spark and Globespan Capital Partners, and it’s just signed a content and advertising partnership with major lifestyle TV network Scripps. Scripps programming such as content from HGTV, The Food Network and the DIY Network will be syndicated through the 5min site. Meanwhile 5min will also share some if its content back to the Scripps online properties.
MediaMemo, AllThingsDigital, July 23rd, 2009
The company, which is based in New York City but has its roots in Israel, takes a different tack toward video than the would-be YouTubes: Rather than serving as a portal for user-generated clips or movies and TV shows, it cobbles together a library of how-to videos and distributes them to sites that don’t have any videos of their own. It now claims to reach 14 million video views across 200 sites.
Daisy Whitney’s New Media Minute, July 28, 2009
Venture capitalists are still opening their wallets for Web video startups. The online video site and syndication service 5min.com that specializes in how-to videos just scored $7.5 million in venture capital in its second round of fundraising. Daisy Whitney explains in the New Media Minute why this investment is NOT about the content, but rather about 5mins technology.
A big part of its vast reach comes from hundreds of publishers and advertisers who use the company’s VideoSeed product, which uses semantic technology to automatically match videos to their respective audiences. What I personally like about 5min is the rich, custom video player, dubbed SmartPlayer, and the generally high quality of the how-to videos.
VideoNuze – Will Richmond, July 23, 2009
5min, which I last wrote about in Dec. ‘08, is a textbook Syndicated Video Economy company. Its key value proposition is an automated, comprehensive solution for sites seeking to incorporate high-quality relevant video that also offers content providers viewership reach and awareness beyond their own destination sites. There is no cost to either distributors or content providers to participate and resulting ad revenues are split among the parties… The model is enabled by 5min’s VideoSeed syndication platform, which matches video from 5min’s 100,000+ title catalog to pages that its distribution network’s sites specify. The matching is based on the video’s metadata which 5min has assigned and a semantic understanding of the pages themselves. 5min’s video player is embedded on these pages, providing content and ads. The network now consists of hundreds of horizontal (e.g. Answers.com, Wikia, etc.) and vertical sites that reach over 200 million unique visitors/mp generating 14 million unique viewers/mo.
There are tons of free pattern Web sites for the craft enthusiast. If you’re interested in learning a new craft or finding DIY project instructions, there are many video tutorials to choose from, such as 5min (http://www.5min.com/).
Doing for video what Google’s AdSense does for text, the company works with publishers around the Web such as Answers.com and wikiHow to place contextually relevant how-to clips next to the right content at their sites. Currently the site works with familiar magazine brands as well as with less recognizable digital studios to amass professionally produced clips for redistribution around the Web. ELLE.com clips on how to make fairy headbands could be placed next to fashion- and craft-related content at a site. Last-minute tax tips from Kiplinger.com might show up near tax help articles. The site works also with CarandDriver.com and WomansDay.com, among other magazine brands…For publishers, 5min seems to offer a new route to hyper-distributing the online video that often remains locked on their own destination sites.
Want to get advice on using your iPhone effectively, or on asking your boss for a raise? Or maybe you’d prefer to leave work behind a bit and learn how to play the bass, or how to master the Pilates abs core workout routine. You’ll find all that and plenty more from this service, which hosts hundreds of videos of 5 minutes or less. It’s a do-it-yourselfer’s dream.
My favorite feature on 5min is the company’s video player. Unlike some players that only let you play, stop, rewind, and fast-forward a clip, 5min’s video player lets you zoom in, proceed frame-by-frame, and run the video in slow motion so you don’t miss any steps. That feature comes in especially handy when you watch a video on a complex topic and the expert is moving too fast in their instruction.
What are the five online video startups you should keep your eye on in 2009? In this week’s edition of the New Media Minute, Daisy Whitney shares her five picks for companies to watch in the year ahead. They are video site MyDamnChannel.com, measurement service Quantcast, technology firm Kaltura, how-to service 5min.com and convergence software service Boxee.tv. For all the details, check out the New Media Minute.
TheHollywoodReporter.com, December 2, 2008
5min has in recent months signed syndication deals with sites reaching more than 110 million unique users. Via its VideoSeed platform, it can provide its how-to video content by semantically matching it to relevant, on-topic partner sites and offer it up via its proprietary SmartPlayer. Unlike YouTube and others, the company tags videos and provides metadata itself rather than leaving such tasks to users.
5min’s videos are produced by the likes of NBC Universal, Hachette (publisher of such magazines as Elle and Car & Driver), Ford Models and Kiplinger’s. It also syndicates user-generated content. VideoSeed, for example, allows any site about or featuring an article about personal finance to serve Kiplinger’s videos, while auto sites could get video from Car & Driver.
VideoNuze.com, December 3, 2008
5Min, one of the many well-funded entrants in the video-based how-to/knowledge space which I wrote about last Feb, has recently introduced VideoSeed, a clever syndication tool that has already helped drive its video to dozens of partner sites aggregating 110 million unique visitors per month. VideoSeed is another indicator that the Syndicated Video Economy is helping shape product development priorities throughout the broadband industry.
TechCrunch.com, December 2, 2008
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.
Is the next big thing on the Web a video content syndication strategy that slices audiences across sites according to niche interests and sells advertising targeting these niches?
How-to online video provider 5min thinks so. Started as a classic destination Web site last year, it has in recent months quietly entered the content distribution game by syndicating its video content to text-focused sites, such as general information destinations Answers.com and wikiHow.com, as well as enthusiasts sites like BackyardGardener.com.
Women’s Health Magazine, Summer 2008
Recently, 5min was named as one of the 100 most useful sites on the web by Women’s Health Magazine. We were stoked to see that just like you, Women’s Health seems to think we’re pretty cool, making it to #5 on the list.
The Washington Post, July 29, 2008
Life123 offers a mix of licensed and originally produced content. Only written, in-house content, which will make up 70 percent of the site, will be paid for directly. Content acquired from outside partners is obtained through a variety of deals, including performance-based measures. For video?one of the hottest how-to areas?the company is partnering with 5min.com, an Israeli startup that raised $5 million earlier this year from Spark.
5min describes itself as the life videopedia where people share tips and how-to’s in videos that are no longer than 5 minutes. Videos are available in categories like arts, business, extreme, fashion, fitness, food, games, health, home, music, parenting, people, pets, spiritual, sports, tech, travel, wheels, life tips, and knowledge.
You can register at the site as a member and create your studio, which is your personal space to save your favorite videos. You can share your own videos at 5Min and even smarten them up with tools from the site.
TechCrunch.com, April 22, 2008
Instructional video site 5min has released a new beta version of their Smart Player, 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 Smart Player 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.
I love video. After all, why read about a technique when you can see it demonstrated? That’s why you should make a point of visiting 5min/Arts/Photography. This site is jam-packed with user-submitted videos about everything from cooking to pet training to playing musical instruments. The photography-oriented videos include advice on using Adobe Photoshop, handling your camera settings, and taking portraits and close-ups. Best of all, no video runs more than five minutes, so you can learn in bite-sized chunks.
Tech Confidential, January 3, 2008
I’ve just spent a half hour watching videos on 5min.com learning the Sicilian defense, how to make Thai egg salad (it’s all in the pickled garlic) and how to cut my hair into a Mohawk (my office dresses “business casual.”) It’s a fun, well-designed site, which is what may have spurred early-stage venture firm Spark Capital to invest $5 million in the startup.
American Venture Magazine, January 3, 2008
5min, the “how-to” video website, today announced it has received $5 million in Series A financing from Spark Capital. 5min is the leading online instructional video site on the Internet, allowing people to share their expertise in various categories as well as find short video solutions for every practical question.
NewTeeVee.com, January 2, 2008
How-to video sites make a lot of sense. Video is often a far better way to demonstrate how to do something than text or audio.
5min has appropriately raised $5 million in a Series A financing round from Spark Capital. The how-to video site has been quietly growing in a sector we haven’t seen much activity in lately, outside of some niche developments particularly geared for educational purposes. Aside from the funding, 5min will also be moving its offices to New York City some time this month, making the move from Tel-Aviv, Israel to become an U.S.-based company.
20minuten.com, October 18, 2007 
Der perfekte Zungenkuss: Pokern, kochen, Hunde putzen: Die Website 5min erteilt Nachhilfeunterricht per Videobotschaft.
Online how-to videos rise in popularity: Rather than read this article, why don’t you learn something useful? In the time it takes to read this, you could instead watch an online video that shows you how to do something practical in the real world — like fold a T-shirt in two seconds.
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.
I also share 5min’s basic philosophy that everybody is an expert in something.
5min is now on my personal watchlist of interesting Internet TV startups to watch.
5min.com is a place where you can share your knowledge and find multiple avenues where you can solve your ultimate needs both as a consumer and as an organization.
5min combines several different smartmobby ideas and technologies in an excellent way: User-generated short videos, collective knowledge creation, peer-to-peer media sharing, open educational content.
If you find that some of your favorite YouTube videos are HowTo’s, then you should check out 5min.com, a video sharing site dedicated to short tutorials.
The Alarm Clock, April 16, 2007
All credit to 5Min for wanting to do more than just aggregate videos. The startup created a video system specifically for instructional content.
Nu kan du på få minutter lære at diskodanse, binde et slips og fjerne irriterende støv fra din mobil. Websiden 5min.com er himmerige for gør-det-selv-folket.. Her findes massevis af videoer, som er mÃ¥lrettet gør-det-selv-folket.
All kunskap mellan himmel och jord – p bara 5 minuterOch fr att frstrka lärandet har företaget utvecklat en särskild mediaspelare vid namn The Smart Player, där du kan lägga till text med instruktioner till dina filmer.
When it comes to creating a service that provides information in a visual manner, 5min has done a pretty good job.
Killer Startsps, April 1, 2007
This is an interesting concept that takes videos and web learning in a different direction. Companies could use this to teach users how to properly use their services or equipment, serving as a great promotion.
Imagina voc entrar em um site que te d a possibilidade de aprender um monte de coisa em apenas 5 minutos ? Pois exatamente isso que o site 5min.com faz.
From Colombia. You can see me at http://www.erbzine.com/mag21/2114.html
My reply:
“Congratulations! That is a great way of listening and learns about British World of English. I would like to hear more about real terms of the computer science to helping spanish and latino people to learn the correct words of this subject, necessary for everybody. “
Congratulations on laying the foundation for the future of online video. The platform is sure to allow so many companies to expand into specific, targeted niches based upon the 5min application. Good job guys, looking forward to working with you.
Keenan Glass
Great-Marketing.com