AOL Acquires 5min Media, Promises 'Video Ecosystem For The Next Decade'

5Min-Website-B1 

Making good on its vow to bolster content, AOL on Tuesday announced the acquisition of popular video sharing startup 5min Media. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The deal is part of AOL's broader content-centric strategy, which CEO Tim Armstrong has been pursuing for the last year.

"5min Media is the perfect complement to our powerful video capabilities -- it provides a missing piece in the AOL value chain that completes our end-to-end video offering," Armstrong said Tuesday. "AOL is building a video ecosystem for the next decade."

5min is a syndication platform for instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos -- both professionally produced and user-generated. To date, its success has been largely attributed to partnerships for branded content with top media companies like Scripps and Hearst.

To win the content game, AOL is presently hiring hundreds of journalists, editors and various multimedia creators to flesh out its content offerings.

Earlier this year, it brought on David Eun, as president of AOL Media and Studios, to "galvanize and build content networks of scale that can win," he told Online Media Daily. "I don't think it's a secret to say that the turnaround of AOL is hinged on content ... It's going to make or break [the company.]"

Last December, 5min attracted 30.5 million unique viewers, according to comScore. To put that number into perspective, AOL saw 30 million unique viewers that same month.

In terms of videos streamed, 5min saw 75.4 million streams, while its video library now boasts 150,000 videos across a variety of categories ranging from food and health to home and garden.

AOL said it has already begun to integrate 5min Media's video content on its sites through a commercial agreement executed prior to the acquisition.

Earlier this month, 5min struck a syndication partnership with News Corp.'s IGN Entertainment. Per the deal, IGN Entertainment joined the 5min Video Games Channel. Using its proprietary VideoSeed technology, 5min is semantically matching short-form videos like IGN's game reviews, instructions and news from its gaming brands across the 5min network of more than 800 sites, including MegaGames.com, GGL, NextGenWalkthroughs.com and PlayedOnline.com.

Founded in 2006, 5min is headquartered in New York City with offices in Tel Aviv.

1 comment about "AOL Acquires 5min Media, Promises 'Video Ecosystem For The Next Decade'".
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  1. Jonathan Mirow from BroadbandVideo, Inc., September 28, 2010 at 3:44 p.m.

    Me! Me! Buy me, dammit. This reminds me of the early daze of AOL / Digital City - they spent 4 million on a NYC internet start-up called Spanker. Wonder what happened to that?

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