News Corp's IGN Partners With 5min Media
- by Gavin O'Malley @mp_gavin, September 2, 2010
News Corp.'s IGN Entertainment on Thursday announced a syndication partnership with popular video sharing site 5min.
Per the deal, IGN Entertainment is joining the 5min Video Games Channel. Using its proprietary VideoSeed technology, 5min Media will semantically match 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.
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.
Also, as Ran Harnevo, CEO of 5min Media, is quick to point out: "We're able to provide partners like IGN new monetization opportunities."
IGN Entertainment is joining G4, CrispyGamer, NextGenWalkthroughs and other video game content providers that have already added their game-related videos to the 5min Media network of nearly 200,000 professional videos.
Earlier this year, IGN overhauled all of the advertising units on its home page and vertical channel pages, doing away with the traditional combination of leaderboards and half-page units and replacing them with dynamic units featuring "pushdown functionality" and "unified skins," along with an "HD-like view" that traverses the width of each page.
In late July, meanwhile, IGN launched a social gaming network dubbed MyIGN. The site encompasses a suite of tools that form the foundation of a content-based social platform that specifically targets gamers. 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.
