5min.com conspiracy theory or clever marketing
As a regular Digg user i have noticed a large number of 5min.com videos making it to the front page. In fact most of the videos would get Dugg within certain time intervals. You could almost predict when the next video is going to appear. It was not just me who noticed this trend. I have seen a number of users make comments such as this one that were buried in the matter of seconds. A bit strange don’t you think? So i decided to investigate further.
5min is a place to find short video solutions for every practical question and is also a place for people who want to share their knowledge.
Pretty much a collection of various instructional videos Youtube style. 5min.com is a young website. Less than one year old. If you have a look at its Alexa traffic graph you will see how popular it has become.
Surprise surprise… Early July was when their Digg campaign took off.
Now lets take a closer look at some of the videos that have been Dugg. Crazy roller coaster crash for example. Submitted by missysupafly. This user joined Digg and quickly voted on 4 Dugg stories in the raw. 14 days later submission is made that makes it to the front page. Similar to every other users submitting 5min.com videos. Another thing that i have noticed is that all those users that have submitted 5min.com videos (I checked 6 or so) joined Digg after the launch of 5min.com. If this was not enough, here is another one for you. People tend to use the same username with every website they register. If you were to look up my nickname/username you would find my footprints all over the internet. What is very strange is that “missysupafly” only exists on Digg. Just like most other users submitting 5min.com videos.
Lets have a look at 5min.com now. The guy (Judging by the name) who uploaded the rollecoaster video to 5min.com RedFred surely has a wide taste. Have a look at the range of videos he has uploaded. He covered almost every category. Not only that, none of the videos are actually his. I have seen a number of them on youtube before 5min.com even existed. His about me reads: “These videos are for all you ladies out there who want to know what’s going on inside a guys head.”. What, like “How to get a guy to notice you”? If you have a look around almost every single user (Uploader) on 5min.com just sits there uploading random how to videos borrowed from other websites. Why would a genuine user do that?
My theory: After realising the viral power of instructional videos a bunch of clever guys decided to launch a startup in this particular niche. The next logical step would be to populate their website with content that has been proven to do well on other website. If a video does incredibly well on one video site it should also do well on another providing that both websites have similar demographics. Then its a matter of creating a fake community, submitting videos to social websites such as Digg and giving them a slight kick start with a few votes. In most cases Digg community would then take over the voting and get that video to the front page. That’s a lot of free traffic!
Disclaimer: This is only my theory. I may well be wrong and the users/sites i have mentioned may well be genuine.
March 8th, 2008 at 1:33 am
You forgot to capitalize your i’s.
March 8th, 2008 at 4:39 pm
Thanks! My English is ever so poor.
March 14th, 2008 at 5:13 pm
bingo!
It actually happens with a whole bunch of sites like Arstechnia, spike, torrentfreak, techcrunch, etc.
March 15th, 2008 at 7:02 am
You are right on. Great observation. 5min.com is digging their stolen videos
March 16th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
I personally don’t think they’re doing something bad
March 16th, 2008 at 4:13 pm
I cannot view their videos on my Macbook Pro (just a blank space when I follow link), so there’s a (wee) segment of the market that will never use their site. Pretty stupid, though, to have a site that’s not accessible to all operating systems.
Just waiting for the backlash of Mac users contradicting me!
March 16th, 2008 at 4:18 pm
Really? I will have a look next time I have access to mac. Ah well, you have not missed much.
March 16th, 2008 at 7:56 pm
I’m on a MBP right now and I can watch their videos just fine.
I’ve noticed this trend too but, unfortunately, it would seem no one is doing anything wrong (that is, breaking ToS).
March 17th, 2008 at 11:07 am
Well, I don’t know too much about how digg works because I never really made much point of using it, other than to find stories like “drunken santa rides bicycle made of recycled dr. pepper cans into mall storefront” and stuff like that, so I dunno how wrong what they are or aren’t doing is…But I will say that as a website 5min have been pretty cool for me to use so far, especially since I use my crafting videos to push crafts and jewelry I make and sell through the Etsy community. It seems to display fine on my Macbook, altho sometimes safari needs a good refresh. I’ve gotten decent traffic coming in through the site, as well as more orders from people who watch my vids. So I’m pretty pleased. I am a bit curious now though.
June 25th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
After looking through 5Min for a little while, the first thing that jumps out at me is that nearly all their videos seem to be ripped off. They have copywrited content all over there with no attribution. So it doesn’t shock me that they’d take it to the next step and spam Digg, etc. It is strange how regularly they post a video on Digg, and how quickly it gets voted up…seems like too niche of a site to do that organically.