5min Raises $7.5 Million to Fuel its Video Syndication Network

Globespan Capital Partners and Spark Capital Invest in Series B Financing

NEW YORK, July 23 /PRNewswire/ --( )5min (www.5min.com), the leading syndication platform and destination for vertically focused broadband lifestyle, instructional and knowledge videos, today announced that it has secured $7.5 million in Series B financing. Led by new investor, Globespan Capital Partners, the round also includes existing investor, Spark Capital. Globespan Managing Director Jonathan Seelig will join 5min's Board of Directors.

5min syndicates its content through its semantic video engine, VideoSeed, and its proprietary video player to websites such as Answers, wikiHow, Wikia and Articlesbase and hundreds of vertical sites. 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.

"While 5min has become the largest 'how-to' video destination site," says Ran Harnevo, CEO and co-founder of 5min, "we've also developed the only video platform that leverages a huge category-specific library to semantically syndicate the most relevant content to passionate audiences across the Web, wherever they exist. We provide every site publisher with professionally produced content, a video technology platform, and a full video monetization solution - all in one free offering."

With the financing, 5min will continue to grow its VideoSeed Semantic Syndication platform, which allows virtually any Web property to inject contextually relevant content, and a source of revenue from day one. The platform essentially creates scalable TV channels for brand-safe content across major categories--including, business, food, health, home, garden, sports, technology, travel and more--and will continue to scale with the new round of capital.

"5min is 2009's answer to the impact of cable on broadcast TV in the 1970s and 1980s, bringing advertisers the opportunity to sell into specific categories with ads that reach an engaged vertical audience across a wide range of Web sites in a single purchase," said Seelig. "A brand can essentially sponsor an entire niche of targeted, enthusiastic consumers."

"5min has beaten all of its milestones since we led the A Round, which include rapid growth in revenue, video views and syndication and content partners," said Spark Capital General Partner Alex Finkelstein. "We are very pleased to have Globespan and Jonathan Seelig join Spark as investors in 5min."

About 5min

5min is the leading syndication platform for lifestyle, knowledge and instructional videos, reaching over 200 million monthly unique visitors. As a destination site, 5min.com is the top "how-to" video site with more than 3.5 million unique visitors each month. 5min's library features short-form videos from some of the world's largest media companies as well as the most innovative independent producers. Video recipes, yoga and fitness routines, tech tutorials, DIY projects for home and garden, health videos on specific conditions, beauty and fashion tips, video game walk-throughs and much more. Go to http://solutions.5min.com for more information.

About Globespan Capital Partners

http://www.gasta.co.uk/Search/5min Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $1 Billion under active management. Globespan takes a balanced approach to investing with multi-stage investments in information technology and cleantech companies. Our investment team has a proven track record based on partnering with management teams to build strong, successful companies. We have significant experience and relationships in Asia which allows us to provide our portfolio companies access to global markets. With offices in Boston, Palo Alto and Tokyo, we invest in companies all across the U.S. and in Japan on behalf of a global base of limited partners. More information about Globespan Capital Partners is located online at www.globespancapital.com.

About Spark Capital

Spark Capital is a venture capital firm with investments focusing on the conflux of the media, entertainment and technology industries. The partners of Spark Capital carry diverse expertise in media and technology industries with proven track records identifying and actively building market-leading companies in sectors including infrastructure (Qtera, RiverDelta, Aether Systems, Broadbus and BigBand), networks (College Sports Television, TVONE and XCOM) services (Akamai, thePlatform, Admeld) and digital media (Twitter, Boxee, 5min). With a deep network that spans technology and media, investing and operations, Spark Capital provides world-class entrepreneurs and revolutionary companies with the resources to succeed in today's marketplace. Spark Capital has $622 million under management, and is based in Boston, Mass. To learn more, visit www.sparkcapital.com.

Content Sites Win With Gasta.com

Gasta.com search network of over 250+ search engines and the content relevancy tools InstantAds and SearchMatch our winners on the content site platform.

Gasta.com offers Increased site engagement:
Gasta Search is the primary mode of navigation on the web, and a better search experience will keep users on your site longer.

Gasta.com Increased content consumption:
Industry research projects that within three years nearly 87 percent of all internet users in the U.S. will be regularly viewing online video – an audience of well over 150 million people. Surfacing your audio and video content as part of a user’s overall search experience is the key to driving increased multimedia consumption and the associated advertising opportunities.
Increased advertising opportunities:
Exposing a previously buried treasure trove of multimedia content opens a new stream of advertising revenue. In addition, Gasta SearchMatch provides enhanced targeting opportunities from the rich metadata that wraps your audio and video content. With video advertising commanding premium pricing, enhancing multimedia consumption and targeting is the key to unlocking this $4 billion advertising opportunity.

Gasta News :socialmedian election widget

Help us test the socialmedian election widget
By Jason Goldberg on October 28, 2008 10:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
socialmedian blog readers: I wanted to provide you with a first look at http://election.socialmedian.com, a site we are launching with the Washington Post and other partners like The Guardian to help people track and participate in election 2008 coverage.



We will formally announce the new site tomorrow (Wednesday)...you can use it now but it is still a work in progress.

The http://election.socialmedian.com site aggregates news and user-feeds related to the election and enables users to join in the election coverage and discussion. We created this site with The Washington Post to enable people to track all the election news from thousands of news sources as well as from Twitter feeds, Flickr photos, YouTube videos, and more all in one place, and (importantly) to join-in and add their own feeds from their favorite sites to provide user reports leading up to and on election day.

You can sign up for the page immediately and add your feeds. Add your Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, blog site etc. and we'll automatically add your relevant contributions on those sites to this page.

Starting Wednesday users will also be able to eaisly grab a widget of this page to put on your own websites and blogs. The WashingtonPost and The Guardian are just two of the first websites that have signed up to use this widget. The widget will highlight user submitted news and reports --> so this is a great way to get your election day coverage on these and other leading sites.

Gasta Video: Noah Elkin from Steak Digital

Optimizing video and images for search is no longer optional. It's a must-have for brands that want to continue connecting with their customers.

Historically, successful advertisements have depended on two main ingredients: compelling words and captivating imagery. The ascendancy of search engine marketing has put a new premium on the value of words, for if search tells us anything, it's that marketers should take their cues from the terms people plug into search engines.

In effect, marketers who want to capture their customers' attention need to "listen" to the different ways they are expressing their wants and desires through search. Consequently, advertising success today depends on a slightly different set of criteria. Marketers must harness insights into customers' thought processes and the vernacular they use to seek out brands and products. You must synchronize that language across a campaign to ensure that customers not only look for your brand but also find it once they've gone to the web.

In-house and agency search practitioners, as well as experts around the industry, have been sounding this drumbeat for a long time now, but search still faces an uphill battle in relation to sexier on- and offline media. What it really boils down to is an image problem.

The fact that a highly -- if not the most -- effective advertising medium (by some measures, anyway) continues to have an image problem speaks volumes about the culture of advertising. We live in an age when John Wanamaker's old adage -- "Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half" -- rings truer than ever for brand managers caught in the transition from offline to online media.

It's not that brand advertisers aren't interested in results and ROI, as tempting as that might be to conclude at times for some search practitioners. Rather, it's that TV and even print are far more emotive than the comparatively austere text ad. TV and print also have the luxury of employing visuals, which provide richer options for conveying a brand's tone, image and message, as well as ultimately creating the kinds of brand associations that lead to loyalty and advocacy. In an industry that evolved on the back of images -- still, moving or otherwise -- there is some truth in the notion that search is as unsexy a medium as you can find. That is, unless your idea of "sexy" is the cold hard dollars that come from conversions -- not that there's anything wrong with that.

How do we go about making search sexier without compromising its effectiveness? Ironically, it may come down to using words to deliver the power of images. Provocative findings from comScore have been making the rounds of all the major conferences this year, and they point strongly in this direction. On the one hand, comScore has shown that interest in multimedia content among searchers is both widespread and not yet matched by placements in blended search results (as first revealed at the Orion panel at SES NY), particularly where video is concerned. On the other, recent studies have demonstrated that over-emphasis on last-click conversions and under-emphasis on latent on- and offline effects result in the loss of a shockingly high percentage of search's overall value.

Combined, the following three trends shed light on the relationship of keywords to images:

• The call to better monetize the 95 percent of paid search ads that do not lead to a click
• The implication that search can and should function as more of a branding vehicle
• Increased searcher interest in video, news and images

As blended search results become the norm across the industry, optimizing video and images is no longer a nice-to-have -- it's a must-have for brands that want to continue connecting with their customers.

I've always said that search will give TV new relevancy to the extent that commercials drive viewers to search engines to find more information about a product they've seen advertised. Now it's becoming increasingly evident that TV -- and news clips and movies and music videos and images -- will do their part to provide new relevancy to search as well.

Noah Elkin is vice president of corporate strategy for international search-inspired digital agency Steak.

Gasta News: Music goes portable again.

In a week that will see heavy coverage of MySpace Music when it launches, SanDisk (NSDQ: SNDK) has announced an ambitious venture to sell its microSD memory cards pre-loaded with DRM-fr*ee MP3 music from all the four majors EMI Music, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. The service, dubbed “slotMusic”, will launch this coming holiday season in U.S., at Best Buy and Wal-Mart (NYSE: WMT), among others, and then will be launched in Europe, though no specific timeline was given.

The MicroSD format, a SanDisk invention, is used mainly in mobile phones, and also in some MP3 players. When slotMusic goes on dale, these cards will be packaged with a tiny USB sleeve so that they can be compatible with various PCs and laptops, and any other device with a USB connector, including say an in-car sound system. The MP3-based music tracks will be played back at up to 320 kbps, the company said. With 1GB of capacity, slotMusic cards can hold songs, as well as liner notes, album art, videos, and other content that an artist/labels may choose.

There have been previous attempts by SanDisk and others to sell music and content cards through retails, though with limited success.

SanDisk is also in the midst of a takeover attempt by Samsung, which made its $5.85 billion public bid for the company last week, but the company rejected it as too low.

Gasta Video News:

Online TV viewing doubles in past year

The number of Britons viewing TV online has more than doubled in the last 12 months, according to Ofcom.
The regulator’s annual UK Communications Market Report found the number of people watching TV programmes online grew from 8% to 17%, and nearly a third of internet
The number of UK internet users who watched YouTube hit 9m in April, nearly 50% more than a year ago, while the BBC iPlayer delivered more than 700,000 daily video streams in May 2008.

The number of households with digital video recorders grew 53% in 2007 to nearly 6m (23%) and the majority (88%) use them to fast-forward through ads.
The findings were in line with increased online ad spend, which, according to Ofcom, grew to £2.8bn in 2007, attracting more money than the combined ad spend on ITV1, Channel 4, Five and S4C. Take-up of broadband through a landline grew from 52% of households to 58% in 12 months.

This was mainly driven by consumers upgrading from dial-up to broadband.
More than one in ten mobile phone users have accessed the internet on their phone and 3G mobile connections increased by 4.7m (60%) in 2007 to reach 12.5m subscribers.

According to the Ofcom report, the average UK adult spent seven hours nine minutes a day using various communications services, six minutes more than in 2002. This includes radio listening, TV viewing, time spent online, texting or talking on the telephone.

Gasta Keywords: most popular sales

Tip: Gasta Keyword Sales such as loans, mortgage,credit cards, holidays, cheap flights, hotels, used cars,are often found with the prefix 'online' more companies are using the tagline gasta keyword=
in their advertising literature and paper adverts. This is good news as gasta gets ready to launch the new web.20 version of the site with enhanced advertising features and more opportunities for campiagns. check the new interface below on http://www.mysearchmachine.com
TOP Keywords
UK engine only.
Commercial Mortgages, Computer Accessories, Computer Training, Corporate Events, Corporate Training, Credit Transfer, Data Recovery, Discount hotels ,Gold card, Home Finance, Investment Advice, Loan Specialists, Marketing, MasterCard, Mobile Games, Mortgage Deals,Mortgage Finders, Online Betting, Online Bingo ,Online Bookmakers, online Dating,

Gasta Video:Prepare for Web 3.0

This is a facinating article by Phil Cooper about the advance of video and (UGC) user generated content on the Internet

Gasta.com has just launched its own unique video services great for 'mash up' mixs and 'speeding through' every body wants the 15 minutes of fame.

Prepare for Web 3.0

Phil Cooper, CEO, Utarget Networks

Video continues to expand rapidly online. This new market has been driven by users, both consuming and generating video. Professional digital producers, big and small, are now responding to this user demand by delivering their content online. Short form video is proliferating on the open internet and this may well extend to long form video content. Advertising is becoming the main revenue model to propel this market. Walled garden services may well become submerged under an open internet video tsunami.

Doubters should look at the US market to see the large amount of video now online. But advertising on US TV is holding up compared to the UK. Online spend over there remains proportionally only half that of the UK. So we’re behind the US in putting video online (by about 18 months) but, it would seem, ahead in the web encroaching on TV. It seems UK users are moving from TV to online particularly quickly. ITV and other commercial channels are finally responding to the threat as convergence looms ever larger.

Utarget is proud to have launched the UK’s first online video advertising net work in June 2006 and to have since led the growth of the UK video ad market. YouTube has demonstrated the huge user interest in video but has equally high lighted the problems in monetizing uncontrolled and variable content. In contrast, we represent video ad inventory across top tier websites offering quality content. As of this month, we’re pleased to include the leading online video pioneer, Blinkx, within our network.

Other networks and major sites now offer targeted streamed placements for video advertisers around well produced short and long form content. In addition, there are video players supplied with rich syndicated content, such as Roo Media and Brightcove (as well as our own ad supported player). Through such players we have sites where video is the hero. These aren’t traditional text based sites but broadband TV channels. Most are ad funded but some are brand sponsored. They’re the future of online and show the video market growing and maturing.

Video ads will become the key format for brand advertisers online. They’re increasingly attracted to video ads as the online format that uniquely offers the impact and reach of TV. Our experience is that online usage is evolving from lean forward to more laid back due to the browsing of online video. It will never be couch potato but new media specialists will increasingly have to compete against big agency TV departments as the two media converge.

From our market position, Utarget is now seeing a sharp upturn in overall video spend in the UK. Test budgets are rising to £20,000 and more clients are willing to invest by equipping their agencies with creative of appropriate length for online. Expect this to rapidly accelerate. We predict that a large part of TV will be distributed online by 2010.