5min Media launch accesses engaged consumers through video

A new video offering should help brands reach more consumers through video. This week 5min Media launched their Celebrity News Channel, a short form video offering utilizing content from partners such as Sugar, TalkHollywood, Meredith TV and Splash News. The offering is focused on celebrity news and gossip, a category with a rapidly growing fan base.

by Kristina Knight

5min Media is the largest independent video network in the US, reaching more than 22 million consumers monthly; comScore ranks the hub first in seven vertical categories such as Home, Health, Fashion, Beauty and Auto. According to the company, users spend 7.6 minutes (average) with content from the celebrity channel.

"[Advertisers] are looking for new ways to reach these engaged, yet fragmented audiences," said Ran Harnevo, CEO of 5min Media. "Our video syndication platform enables us to successfully reach niche audiences, giving them the content they desire in the places they are already visiting online. We are excited to partner with these top media brands to create our Celebrity News Channel and believe consumers will engage more than ever in the latest entertainment and gossip buzz from these popular sources."

The news channel will by syndicated to more than 800 entertainment-rich content sites such as Betty Confidential, SheKnows.com and Hearst's UGO sites. These syndication partners will be able to embed the news channel directly to their websites, giving them a constant content feed.

Through VideoSeed, 5min's proprietary technology, video content will be semantically matched with publishers' content. Semantically targeting the video content to existing on-site content should give advertisers a better chance to engage users. Semantic targeting uses not only keywords but analyzes how a keyword or phrase is used to more directly target content.

The latest numbers from comScore show that the top three website properties continue to be Google (including YouTube), Yahoo and Microsoft sites, but in October there was increased traffic to news and information sites, likely due to the 2010 Elections in the US. Looking specifically at video, comScore reports that just over 175 million Americans watched video content in October for an average of 15 hours per viewer.

Tags: 5min Media, comScore, online video, video advertising, video content, video trends