5min has appropriately raised $5 million in a Series A financing round from Spark Capital. The how-to video site has been quietly growing in a sector we haven't seen much activity in lately, outside of some niche developments particularly geared for educational purposes. Aside from the funding, 5min will also be moving its offices to New York City some time this month, making the move from Tel-Aviv, Israel to become an U.S.-based company.
Another major player in this sector is of course VideoJug, which also offers several features for the promotion and ingestion of videos, along with other necessities like transcripts, etc. The other recent trend we've seen with DIY video sites like NowPlayIt has been the creation of a marketplace, with a direct appeal to content creators in hopes that they'll want to earn additional revenue from the promotion and purchase of their content/lessons. 5min and VideoJug, which are free to use, have managed to provide better tools than most of these other video sites.
While this can be partly due to funding, it's also clear that free information is generally better and gets a better response from the consumer. Will this model eventually need to become a marketplace, similar to Revver or perhaps the "tip" system that Radiohead utilized? As more video moves to online distribution, there will be more than just these niche sites trying to monetize DIY content. I think larger entities like Scripps will be looking to increase advertising supplements while independent networks may indeed adopt a rev-share model of some sort in order to incentivize the submission of quality content.