AOL is buying video syndication network 5min Media, reports AllThingsD. According to Israeli news outlet YNews, this is indeed a done deal, and the price is between $50 and $65 million. It isn’t exactly what you’d call a stellar exit for 5min’s investors, who pumped just south of $13 million into the company, but not a terrible one either. The acquisition will reportedly be announced Tuesday morning. Launched back in 2007, the site was initially a portal for how-to videos, but eventually grew into a video syndication giant. That means 5min aggregates tens of thousands of instructional, knowledge and lifestyle videos across a wide variety of categories and dynamically distributes them to partner websites such as Answers.com and DailyMotion. Video content originates from small indie producers to big-name brands and media companies, and the topic ranges from recipes, yoga and fitness routines, tech tutorials, DIY projects for home and garden and health videos on specific conditions to beauty and fashion tips. 5min claims its Video Syndication Platform currently reaches over 160 million uniques per month. The company boasts proprietary semantic technology dubbed VideoSeed powering its Syndication offering and helping bring its “Video Everywhere vision” to life across virtually any site. VideoSeed contextually matches the most relevant videos in its library with a Syndication Partner site’s existing text content. You can see how this fits into AOL’s nichebuster content strategy, which is unsurprisingly taking some serious time and effort to translate into results that please its shareholders. In January 2010, AOL moved to acquire StudioNow for $36.5 million in a bid to integrate a solid video creation platform into its content management system Seed.com. AOL at the time said it would harness StudioNow’s technology platform and network of more than 3,000 creatives to develop and produce professional videos at the request of AOL editors. CrunchBase Information5min MediaAOLInformation provided by CrunchBase 0 0 1 1 2 2 3 3 4 4 5 5 6 6 7 7Authors: Robin Wauters