AOL has clearly got too much cash and ambition right now. On the same day it acquired tech blog TechCrunch, the company also announced its acquisition of video syndication company 5min Media.
5min Media
5min Media is a company which has built up a huge online audience thanks to its instructional videos and video syndication platform.
In essence it allows companies lacking in video assets to bulk up its offerings by syndicating videos from other sources via 5min. The contributing video publishers gets a share of any advertising revenue, as does 5min. So everybody ends up winning.
Overall, 5min has become the biggest winner of all, having been acquired by AOL for at least $50 million.
AOL Acquires 5min
While most of the Web was busy watching AOL and TechCrunch cozy up to each other, the online media conglomerate quietly announced it had added 5min Media to its ever-growing list of Internet properties.
Terms of the deal have not been disclosed but it’s though the deal was worth somewhere in the region of $50 million to $65 million.
AOL CEO Tim Armstrong said:
“5min Media is the perfect complement to our powerful video capabilities. It provides a missing piece in the AOL value chain that completes our end-to-end video offering from content creation through syndication and distribution to the consumer experience.”
“Our acquisition of 5min Media is the latest in a number of steps we have taken this year to better position AOL to capture the growing video opportunity on the web. We are building a video ecosystem for the next decade.”
AOL has bought 5min with the intent to increase its video distribution options as well as increase its appeal to advertisers. 5min claims to have more than 1,000 companies and producers syndicating video, 200,000 videos in its network, and 160 million monthly unique viewers.
Conclusions
The acquisition of 5min follows on from AOL buying StudioNow for $36.5 million in January. These two taken together shows just how much emphasis AOL is placing on online video, and it doesn’t want to be left behind while the sector forges ahead.
Thankfully for AOL it has the means to just buy up the tools, services, platforms, and companies it needs to in order to stay in the game.
