DailyMotion Comes to US, Pays Users
Nick Gonzalez
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Paris based DailyMotion has always been available in the US, but today they’re launching a US based operation headed up by Joy Marcus, former senior vice president of global marketing at Time Warner. Dailymotion is one of the largest social video sites jockying for the distant second position after YouTube, with 4.7 million unique streamers in April (YouTube did 53.5 in March) according to Comscore. According to Comscore, however, DailyMotion users spend 4 times as much time on videos as MetaCafe users. However, MetaCafe’s downloadable player can skew the data.
The move makes sense for the site, since the US is DailyMotion’s second largest market outside of France. To differentiate they are planning on nailing a social video trifecta: offering professional content, contextual advertising, and paying top content producers (companies or individuals) through their MotionMaker program.
There’s no word on the specific premium content offerings, but they are forming a specialized creative and programming team. Danny Passman, formerly of MTV Networks and a development executive at fuse and VH1 will head up this team. They have also brought several other MTV executives on board. Catherine Mullen, former General Manager of MTV UK and Ireland and executive vice president of fuse, will be leading international content acquisition and development initiatives. Head of their German operations, Werner Brell, also previously worked for MTV Networks.
DailyMotion says they plan on monetizing the videos through banner and “innovative forms” of in-video advertising. They also say they will have “contextual in-stream ads”, which makes me suspect they will use interstitial video ads. Implementing an advertising platform into their site is not trivial. Determining a video’s content in order to link ads to it is a complex problem we looked at in our roundup of startups taking on the video advertising problem. There is no word on how DailyMotion will split the revenue with producers, but they may follow MetaCafe’s lead and only dole out cash to the top producers (which pays $100/20,000 views).
Although social video sites like DailyMotion are running a distant second to YouTube, the fight for second place is still important. These sites offer an important opportunity for content publishers to hedge their bets against YouTube and make sure Google doesn’t dominate all of their online distribution.
There is no “video advertising problem,” just video advertising opportunity.
Doesn’t this mean a flood of copyright violations? They have more illegal content then anyone that I’ve seen.
They also have some great porn there (did we say french?) This is what dailymotion is doing so much better than youtuve - porn and copyrighed full-episodes/features on high quality. Yey!
DailyMotion has 38M uniques globally of which about half in France. DM is fighting very hard against copyright infringement with Audible etc.
TechCrunch should know better! The reason users spend so much time on dailymotion’s website is because episodes of copyrighted tv series are 30-50min each and movies are even longer.
I read that they have implemented audiablemagic - but it’s still quite easy to find a lot of copyrighted stuff.
(google “x-Raze-x” if you missed a scrubs episode)
hundreds of other “directory” sites link to this content to make it easy to find..
It’s seems any video I put on line is dominated by US views it will be interesting to see if the rise and rise of Daily Motion opens a broader viewership to average vloggers and video producers. Dean
Alex, We covered the piracy on these sites earlier: Forget YouTube: Go To These Sites If You Want Hard Core Copyright Infringing Content
Another way to make money on these sites is product placement througth Brandfame - http://www.brandfame.com
i guess it does pay to steal content.
Sorry bad link above outbackontv.com a missing w
Thanks Dean
Why can’t they offer $15 at itunes or something in exchange for users filling out a 1 page profile survey? No names needed.
Just cause I’m watching content related to some topic does not mean one can glean my purchasing habits.
There seems to be a “too many companies” not enough eye balls … problem for every company besides youtube.
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