How-To Site 5Min Partners With Health Central

How-to video Web site 5min on Wednesday is expected to announce a partnership with condition-specific consumer health and wellness publisher HealthCentral.

The deal combines 5min's audience -- which it says amounts to 21 million monthly unique visitors -- with HealthCentral's 11 million monthly unique visitors.

The tie-up also adds HealthCentral's own library of hundreds of health videos to the existing 5min library, which will be distributed through 5min's VideoSeed semantic syndication platform, which matches videos to relevant audiences across some 350 sites.

"Health seekers want information that is relevant to them, when and where they want to find it," said Christopher Schroeder, CEO of HealthCentral. "5min provides us with a technology that enhances our ability to get the most specific videos to the right people at the right time."

It's been a good month for 5min, which competes in the increasingly saturated markets of free "how to" and "do it yourself" information.

Earlier this month, Scripps Networks, which operates lifestyle cable TV channels such as HGTV and Food Network, agreed to supply videos to 5min's home and food categories.

Under the agreement, Scripps is also directly selling advertising not only on its own inventory on 5min, but all syndicated video in those two categories.

Likewise, HealthCentral will also exclusively sell advertising to pharmaceutical and over-the-counter advertisers on 5min's millions of video streams that are focused on health, specific conditions, parenting, pregnancy, fitness and nutrition.

With the deal, "we provide an instant new source of revenue for many of the health sites on the Web," said Ran Harnevo, CEO of 5min.

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.

The New York-based company has raised nearly $13 million in venture capital to date, most recently landing a $7.5 million second-round of funding led by Globespan Capital Partners and including Spark Capital.

Next story loading loading..