One of our distribution partners - 5Min - has raised a Series B round from Globespan Capital Partners. Existing investor Spark Capital also participated in the round. The company had previously raised $5.3M, bringing the total to just under $13M.
Globespan Managing Director Jonathan Seelig will join 5min’s Board of Directors. 5Min is one of our distribution partners that apart from YouTube actually drives some volume, which is promising and suggests that they get the kind of traction that VCs would look for in today’s climate.
The 5min platform collectively reaches a potential audience of over 200 million monthly unique visitors, and of this group, 14 million people watch at least one video per month. 5min has also built a multi-vertical content library of over 100,000 professionally produced videos through partnership with media companies such as Hearst Corporation’s UGO Entertainment, Elle, Car & Driver, The Doctors, Pet Side, Britannica, Ford Models, Kiplinger, Big Think, WatchMojo, Road & Track, Woman’s Day and more.
For example, in our record-setting month of June 2009 where we did 6.5M streams across our network (up from 4.8M the month before), YouTube accounted for nearly 3M of those, and 5Min clocked in at over 500,000 streams, which was an uptick from the previous months admittedly, but promising nonetheless considering that YouTube commands such a lead on all other sites.
Now that I am in NYC I’ve had the chance to meet some of the members of 5Min’s team personally and I like what they’re doing to differentiate in their category, so despite my opinion that the How To space is awfully crowded online, I can fully understand why VCs think they are worthy of more capital.
But, the space is crowded: Expert Village, VideoJug, Graspr, Instructables, SuTree, Howcast, MindBites, Monkeysee, WonderHowTo, FindHow, eHow, WatchDoit, to name a few.
It’s also worth noting that eHow is part of Demand Media who is armed to the teeth with over $300M in capital and VideoJug is no slouch with $40M in backing.
As we’ve seen and I have been saying all along, more VC money leads to more problems… but the point is: there’s lots of gunpowder left and these guys will be pummelling one another for months to come, so sooner or later, you will see some mergers and inevitable rounds of consolidation in the space.
Check out some of our content on 5Min here.
As we cross 35M streams since launching a couple of years ago:
WatchMojo.com is happy to welcome a couple of our latest distribution partners, the first is Sling Media:
“Sling.com is a wonderful combination of premium video content, television viewing, robust editorial and consumer-friendly access and socialization features,” said Jason Hirschhorn, President, Sling Media Entertainment Group. “Users will have a blast watching great clips, full length shows and movies while customizing the viewing experience to their liking.”
Sling.com features:
- Robust editorial programming: Sling.com’s editorial team creates great content including blogs, playlists and clip collections.
- Socialization features: Users can subscribe to any channel, show or user to create a feed of programming and activity that reflects your personal tastes and those of your social network.
- Slingbox access: For the first time, Slingbox owners can now access and view their home television (cable, satellite receiver) and DVR via the Sling.com website, making their Slingboxes available without a software client download.
“Our mission from day one was to enable access to content regardless of screen or source,” said Blake Krikorian, co-founder and CEO of Sling Media, Inc. “Sling Media will continue to link and meld video solutions from the television, computer and mobile device to create seamless experiences for consumers.”
Check out our channel here.
Also being announced today, but live for some time, is our relationship with 5Min.com. Here is the press release on that, more info on Tech Crunch, and a video to boot:
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