5min.com

» see 5min.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

5min never reached turkey at meaningful scale. it lived embedded on aol properties and on a wide network of us publisher sites. aol had no retail or content footprint in turkey by the time 5min existed. the closest most turkish users came to it was reading an instructional clip on an aol-syndicated us blog and seeing the 5min player chrome at the bottom of the embed.

the company was founded in 2007 in tel aviv by ran harnevo with two cofounders. the pitch in the name was that any topic could be covered in five minutes or less of video. publishers wanted to host instructional how-to clips without paying to produce them, and 5min syndicated a library of those clips across a partner network while splitting ad revenue with the host site.

by 2010 the network was running clips on hundreds of partner sites across the us and israel. that september aol agreed to buy the company for 65 million dollars in cash. harnevo became aol's vice president of video and then president of video. 5min was supposed to become the spine of aol's how-to and reference video business going forward.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the breakout ~

harnevo's pitch inside aol was that they would build a video ecosystem for the next decade. this was the period right after the huffington post acquisition when aol was buying media properties on the assumption that it could rebuild itself as a content company. 5min fit that thesis. the network's library scaled past 200,000 clips and the partner site count climbed past 1,000 by 2012.

~ what it became ~

in 2012 aol launched the aol on brand as a unified umbrella for its video properties. the goal was to consolidate 5min with huffpost video and a handful of smaller channels under one consumer-facing name. the 5min brand slowly stopped being used in press. partner deals stopped referencing it. by 2014 the brand had effectively been folded into aol on with no separate site or distinct presence.

harnevo himself left aol in 2014 and went on to found homeis, a community network for immigrants. aol on as a brand died with the verizon acquisition of aol in 2015 and the subsequent rollups into oath and then into verizon media. 5min as a name disappeared somewhere in that pipeline. no shutdown notice was ever published. there was no service to migrate from.

~ the long tail ~

5min is in this catalog because of the era it represents. between 2008 and 2012, a class of companies built networks of short web video on the theory that there was an instructional middle layer between text articles and television. these networks placed clips on partner sites and split pre-roll ad revenue with the publishers. youtube had already won the consumer-side category by then, but the b2b syndication market still felt open. it was not. youtube embeds were free and mobile would soon overtake the desktop-embed ecosystem on its own. the partner-network business model mostly disappeared by 2016.

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