DailyMotion Raises $34 Million; Another Copyright Infringing Success Story
Nick Gonzalez
23 comments »
French social video site DailyMotion has raised a $34 million round from Advent Venture Partners LLP and AGF Private Equity, a division of Allianz AG. The new round comes on top of $9.5 million in previous financing from Atlas Ventures and Partech International. The round puts DailyMotion’s total financing beyond that of their competitors, even MetaCafe’s $45 million total financing. Dailymotion’s executive chairman, Mark Zaleski, said the new funds will “allow us to reach operating profitability”.
These larger investments may be a sign of increasingly competitive times or a desire to take their companies all the way to a public offering. YouTube only raised $11.5 million to reach their exit.
DailyMotion has faired well in the competition for second place amongst video sites. They currently attract 37 million visitors a month. Some of this success is no doubt due to the viewers drawn to pirated content hosted on the site. For instance you can still get complete episodes of The Office. They were also recently found guilty of copyright infringement in July. This is despite implementing Audible Magic’s fingerprinting technology back in June.
However, as others have, they are seeking to clean up their act. When they launched in the U.S., they announced they would seek legal content deals and begin rewarding top content producers. Today’s announcement is more specific, highlighting plans to negotiate deals with makers of music, movies and TV shows. Dailymotion has already signed deals with Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group.
Another French company Blogmusik cleared its record in France, signing a deal to continue streaming music as part of a suspected revenue sharing plan. U.S. based Pandora is still kept from going international because of the webradio royalty rates.
And the bubble will burst.
yeah, they’ll lose their advantage over youtube when they go more legit
Are they still throwing money at video sites?
Meltdown of Web 2.0 is not too far off. Some of these businesses must have reincarnated some of the old snake oil pitchmen to garner this kind of money.
Like P.T. Barnum said, ‘ there is one( sucker) born every minute” These VC’s are proving it is as true today as when he said it. Everyone is throwing shit on the wall hoping it sticks. Ugly meltdown soon.
hold on to your butts
Crazy money being thrown around. I hope they are going to use that 34 million to hire a huge amount of people to review every video uploaded. Using Audible Magic’s fingerprinting technology is not going to keep people from uploading movies and shows.
Good for DailyMotion! Piracy rules.
Major copyright violators’ content is flourishing on DailyMotion. But the site is built well and not cluttered like youtube. I am not sure what they need 34 million dollars for?
Can somebody explain how this works. Suppose I start a company with 100,000 dollars and eventually get 50 million in VC money. When my company is bought by , say yahoo for 1 billion, how the money gets shared between me and VC friends??
I agree with Dominic the end MUST be near if sites like this get funding
Truth be told , there are many blogs (Like this one) that are far more investment worthy that never get funded. Thats why the end is never really near
the internet is the worlds largest form of media and it is now just a platform.
@ 8 techmine
A lot of that money is going to DailyMotions founders for them to have an ealry cash out and take some risk off the table.
The remainder will be poured into infrastructure and legal. It’s quite obvious
As for how your company would be split, if your VC gave you $50 MM in Series A, chances are you have about 2%
so you’ll get $20 MM. If your VC phased that in over multiple rounds, chances are you have 10 - 20% so you walk away with $100 - $200 MM.
A lot of nice speculation here; first of all NO the money has not gone to the founders and YES they still own a big chunk of the business. This is not a flip, we are building a real business here. Secondly talk of a bubble is right, but I wonder why you would consider a site with 38M UUs and 1.4bn views and top 50 global a site that does not deserve to get funded. This is a big online property. As for copyright, the two best in class in fighting the infringement are clearly DailyMotion and Metacafe. Both companies go well beyond what the law requires and at DM a lot of the product innovation and creative energies have gone into finding novel ways to stop infringement.
it’s bad, but it’s still legal, i guess. who’s gonna figure out a fair copyright policy for web content?
more complicated question is, who’s interest is it in?
These video sharing sites are nothing but a Napster 2.0 fumbling around till they reach critical mass at which point, they get acquired by a company that can afford their upcoming legal bills.
Jon
“Another Copyright Infringing Success Story” - well, at least Metacafe succeeds without infringing copyrights…
It’s a good thing to have more competition in this sector.
And that will bring more viewers to my video podcast: bestofdailymotionpodcast.com !
DailyMotion is one of the “best” places to upload content. Rarely to they take video down like YouTube. Not quite sure what the laws are in France, but they seem more lenient than the United States.
V
I love Daily Motion. Good for them. Eat the rich.