Instant Video: Take One Text Site, Add Pinch of 5min
www.minonlin.com , April 30, 2009
The how-to video site 5min.com has amassed 2.5 million unique monthly users in two years of operation, which ordinarily would be a key talking point for a dot-com entrepreneur. “The site is just a small piece of what we do,” says CEO Ran Harnevo. “Semantic syndication is what 5min is all about.”
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.
“We turn a text site into a video site in five minutes,” says Harnevo. Publishers can plant a small bit of code in their pages that lets the 5min engine read the page content and place a relevant video in the center of the page.
For publishers, 5min seems to offer a new route to hyper-distributing the online video that often remains locked on their own destination sites. “The niche magazines are dying because the consumer can get the information for free on the Web,” Harnevo argues. “There is no ROI for creating a video brand for one destination. There are no economics in it…period. You would never be able to monetize the video and be profitable.”
He shares ad revenue with the content producers who feed the library and claims double-digit CPMs and a 50% sell-through on “tens of millions of views” in his inventory.
