5-minutes Craft

[Matilda Equiluz]

5Minute Crafts is a do it yourself (DIY)-style YouTube channel owned by TheSoul Publishing.[2][3][4] As of October 2023[update], it is the 16th most-subscribed channel on the platform.[5] The channel is also the 5th most-followed Facebook page. It is based in Cyprus.[6]

5-Minute Crafts' YouTube videos are compilations of videos previously posted on Instagram or Facebook.[7][8] The channel's content consists largely of videos relating to crafts and life hacks, styled in how-to formats, and occasionally, science experiments. The channel's videos employ a style where the camera is focused on a table with objects while only a person's hands appear in the frame, making content with aid of these objects, usually food and DIY ingredients and tools.[9]

TheSoul Publishing was founded by Russia-based entrepreneurs Pavel Radaev and Marat Mukhametov, a team with backgrounds in social media content creation, who launched AdMe.[3][10] In March 2017, the company founded the YouTube channel, Bright Side.[11][12] On November 15, 2016, 5-Minute Crafts was registered on YouTube by TheSoul Publishing.[13] The channel's first video, "5 essential DIY hacks that you need to know" was uploaded the following day.[14]

In 2017, the channel's subscriber and video view counts started to grow rapidly. In an article published by Mic in June 2017, 5-Minute Crafts was noted to have accumulated over 4 million subscribers.[15]

In April 2018, Tubefilter covered a trend regarding springtime cleaning videos on YouTube, noting 5-Minute Crafts' participation.[16] By November, Vox wrote that 5-Minute Crafts was a "wildly successful" channel, citing its then over 10 billion video views and its ranking as the fifth most-subscribed channel on YouTube, having nearly 40 million subscribers at the time.[3] During one week in December 2018, the channel received over 238 million video views.[2]

In November, 2021, the channel celebrated its 5th anniversary on YouTube, with more than 1.7 billion hours watched and 21 billion views.[19]That same month on November 18, 2021, Variety commented that the 5-Minute Crafts Family had the highest-performing YouTube Short to date with nearly 433 million views.[20] As of January, 2022, the channel has 75.4 million subscribers, ranking it as the eleventh most-subscribed channel not operated by YouTube.[5]

With a focus on DIY content, 5-Minute Crafts began to adapt its content for distribution on Pinterest. The activity began by establishing 5-Minute Crafts in English, Spanish and Portuguese. This collaboration with Pinterest was recognised by The Drum Awards for the Digital Industries 2021, winning the "Best use of Pinterest" award.[21]

The channel has drawn criticism for its unusual and potentially dangerous life hacks and its reliance on clickbait.[3][22][23][24] Vox characterized 5-Minute Crafts as "bizarre", describing its content as "do-it-yourself-how-to's that no person could or should ever replicate", and criticizing the channel's heavy use of clickbait thumbnails.[3] Mashable described the channel's videos as "nonsensical" and possibly a form of trolling, singling out a video which claimed to demonstrate how soaking an egg in vinegar and then maple syrup will make it "bigger than before".[22]

BBC's Click criticized 5-Minute Crafts for its "fake kitchen hacks": when following the instructions of a video in which a fresh corncob produced popcorn when microwaved, the presenter found the cob was only warmed up.[23] Ann Reardon of How to Cook That described clickbait recipe channels including 5-Minute Crafts as the "fake news of the baking world", and fact-checked several of their videos on her channel. In particular, she criticized a clip in which a strawberry was soaked in bleach to produce a "white strawberry", saying it would be dangerous if a child were to replicate it and eat the result.[23] The segment has since been removed from the video.[citation needed]

I found out that 5-Minute Crafts came from a 2016 Russian company called AdMe, which focused on digital advertising and content distribution. Later that same year, it developed into TheSoul, which launched the 5-Minute Crafts YouTube channel. TheSoul apparently has 550 employees and produces 1500 videos a month.

These crafts and life-hacks are the strangest things I come across on my social media, however I find I never skip them. I laugh at how ridiculous they are and admire how creative the creators must be.

One of the main reasons I find the creativity behind 5-Minute Crafts so appealing is because it catches everyone's attention. They take everyday issues that happen to people all around the world and try to solve them. I think it is interesting to see how many issues we have, and how many of them 5-Minute Crafts try to solve.

These videos are also intriguing because there are so many of them. The workers for 5-Minute Crafts must be constantly thinking of new issues to cover, which must be so draining. As a student in the arts field, I know how exhausting and hard it is to try to think of multiple creative ideas and execute them the way you imagined. 5-Minute Crafts do this repeatedly, never failing to be creative.

I know these crafts are used to make a lot of money off short, tightly-packed videos, but I think I will always respect 5-Minute Craft videos. They rarely work and are extremely questionable sometimes, but the creativity and dedication behind these videos captures my attention just the same.

Support the launch of 5-Minute Crafts craft boxes in Walmart stores across North America with a multi-platform campaign to raise awareness through significant reach, aiming for 10 million views from the US audience by January 2024.

Enhance brand recognition worldwide, expanding further across platforms and languages through various sub-brands of the 5-Minute Crafts family, focusing on family-friendly content, and leveraging localized channels.

Our strategy for 5-Minute Crafts' multi-platform presence was an intricate mix of tailored content creation and strategic digital outreach, aimed at showcasing our unique brand identity across various digital landscapes. This approach was centered around leveraging our diverse content range and expanding our presence through strategic partnerships and platform-specific initiatives, with the goal of creating a unified yet dynamic multi-platform presence that resonates with a global audience.

In addition to developing new methods of remote video production, our approach was to create content that resonates on a deeper level with our audience. We diversified our content themes to include socially impactful videos focusing on environmental themes and inclusive content that showcased diverse abilities and experiences.

Recognizing the global reach of the 5-Minute Crafts brand, we increased our investment in localized channels. This strategy was aimed at enhancing engagement with international audiences by delivering content that resonates with their cultural and regional preferences.

We adopted a dynamic content strategy across platforms like Snapchat and TikTok, experimenting with different content forms to align with SEO trends and audience interests. This approach was aimed at attracting unique viewers and increasing watch time by tapping into topics such as survival hacks.

We also focused on expanding our presence on new platforms and AVOD/FAST channels, making our content available to a broader audience, and diversifying our digital footprint. These efforts were instrumental in reaching new demographics and enhancing our brand's global appeal.

Adapting to Platform Dynamics: Tailoring our content to suit the unique algorithms and audience behaviors of each platform was a key challenge. We focused on creative content that was adaptable yet consistent across platforms.

Engaging a Global Audience: Another challenge was maintaining engagement across a diverse, global audience. Our strategy of localized content and platform-specific approaches played a crucial role in overcoming this.

Our multi-platform strategy for 5-Minute Crafts was designed to not only expand the brand's digital footprint but also to deepen audience engagement across a variety of digital landscapes. Our approach was about creating a unified yet diverse digital presence, showcasing our commitment to creativity, inclusivity, and audience engagement across the digital landscape.

Few things regularly make me question everything I know about reality than watching a video by 5-Minute Crafts, a DIY YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook channel that traffics almost entirely in esoteric and completely useless life hacks.

5-Minute Crafts is the fifth-largest channel on YouTube, with 69.2 million subscribers. Its Instagram has 43.4 million followers and its Facebook has 65 million likes. Despite this massive following, the channel has no recognizable personalities, makes no attempt to interact with its viewers, and feels generally detached from the human experience.

TheSoul Publishing is "mysterious" in that it comes from a place that has often been associated with "Fake News" and that its owners do not do interviews, nor do they explain in their videos what the deal is. But until someone is able to prove otherwise, it seems like the deal is that the company is chasing virality and the advertising revenue that comes with video views.

AdMe eventually launched 5-Minute Crafts and a brand called Brightside, a website and YouTube channel that focuses on positive news content, listicles, riddles, and a bunch of other banal-ish content. I was unable to figure out when AdMe changed its name to TheSoul Publishing; for a while last year, it seemingly used AdMe and TheSoul interchangeably on its websites, on press releases, and on privacy policies. But, broadly speaking, TheSoul publishing has a dozen-or-so YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook brands, the largest of them being 5-Minute Crafts and Brightside. Brightside is also used interchangeably with TheSoul Publishing on some of its websites.

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