5mins VideoSeed Syndicates How-To Videos To Answers.com And Others

How-to site 5min is expanding beyond its roots as a video portal and has launched a syndication network for its videos called VideoSeed, which uses semantic matching to deliver relevant clips to participating sites. The platform matches keywords found on syndication partner pages and pairs them up with videos in the 5min database according to title and tag information (along with relevant ads to go with the video). Clips are all played in 5min’s speciailized video player, which it launched earlier this year.

The company says that it can successfully distribute videos to syndication partners because its videos are all screened for quality and decency purposes and appropriately tagged with metadata, as opposed to the vast quantities of untagged footage that litter some more popular user-generated video sites.

And unlike some other how-to sites, 5min’s videos aren’t exclusively user-generated. Instead, the site has formed content partnerships

with a number of other sites and media publications, including Ford Models, Elle, Car & Driver, Encylopedia Britannica, and Woman’s Day. Sydication partners (which will be displaying both videos from these content providers as well as 5min’s users) include Answers.com, wikiHow, and Ultimate Guitar. Through these sites 5min says that it will be reaching a whopping 110 million unique users a month, though this assumes that users will be reaching pages that feature the 5min videos (many entries in the aforementioned sites don’t have matching clips).

This is a crowded space, with competition from Howcast, Instructables, and a host of others. Provided 5min’s matching technology can live up to its promises (in my testing I could only find a few matches that displayed videos, so it was hard to gauge how accurate they were), these new syndication deals could help elevate 5min above the rest of the pack.

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