Dailymotion The Next YouTube?
September 04, 2007 | by Christopher Nickson
French video sharing site Dailymotion has raised more money and is stepping up to the plate to challenge YouTube.
Have you heard of Dailymotion? Perhaps not, but what’s being touted as the French answer to YouTube has been racking up successes.
It claims to be the Web’s largest independent video site, with 1.2 billion pages views and more than 37 million unique visitors in July alone. And it’s just raised a cool $34 million is a second round of funding.
Big it might be, but it remains very much in the shadow of the giant. Dailymotion might add 15,000 videos every day, but YouTube adds six hours of video every single minute and is believed to be responsible for a staggering 10% of all Web traffic.
However, the smaller profile has helped Dailymotion in one respect – it hasn’t been the recipient of copyright suits yet, although that might change, since there’s plenty of copyrighted material available there.
However, the site recently imposed a 20-minute upper limit on video slips, which means no more entire episodes of shows, and they plan to bring in new filtering technology to remove all copyrighted material, which will build on their obligation to remove “all clearly illegal content which has been effectively brought to our attention.”
Now flush with cash, Dailymotion plans to increase its overseas expansion. It already has sites in 14 different countries, including South Korea and Turkey, and looks set to work in the areas largely ignored by YouTube. Naturally, part of that expansion will mean increasing the investment in infrastructure for advertisers.
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Jeff on Sep 5th, 2007 at 12:12 AM:
I noticed that a lot of videos of (for example) strippers, professional and amateur, disappeared from Dailymotion at about the same time this happened. Anyone know if this was, say, a condition of their getting the funding? The vanished videos all say they were removed for violating the terms and conditions of Dailymotion, but it's not at all clear that they did; their terms do prohibit "sexually explicit" content but the videos I have in mind were not sexually explicit by any but the most prudish definitions. Even YouTube allows a certain amount of nudity.