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.
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