Dailymotion - maybe YouTubes biggest competitor

Dailymotion has been founded By Benjamin Bejbaum (CEO) and Olivier Poitrey (CTO) in March 2005 in Paris. Having branches in Paris, Athens, Barcelona, Mumbai, London and New York the platform is one of the leading providers in the internet. Certainly this is based on the fact that the site has been translated into 20 languages so far. About eleven portal sites are responsible for their own broadcasting plans so that the offer can be customized to the need of the respective country. YouTube is big, YouTube is powerful. YouTube is everything? Not quite. In 2007 Dailymotion had already been visited by more than 37 million users and could count 1,3 billion page views. Also venture capitalists acknowledged the potential. Up to 2009 the site could treasure over 40 million euros. This success brought even more interest, so that even the French telecommunication provider Orange recognised the potential. In 2011 they acquired 49%, the remaining 51% in 2013. The platform is with more than 128 million visitors per month one of the leading video portals. 2,5 billion videos are viewed monthly. Like on YouTube, users can search for groups, tags or channels to watch videos. By international cooperations with major media partners the number 2 of the online video market grants free access to live videos of sportevents, event videos or news in real time. This wide range allows users to stream free videos as well as payable exclusive content.

Dailymotion at a glance

Dailymotion wants to keep the competition with YouTube for the long-term. Based on its success, they are highly interested in not having any copyright issuses on their site. Therefore it is determined that videos must be uploaded by the owner of the video or the owner of the copyright of the movie. Video content itself must certainly not violate the law as well. First of all: If you want to find out about different features and programmes it’s quite confusing. The site isn’t really clear and userfriendly. Not only, that only bits and pieces are fully translated, also if you want to get more detailed information about features and functions you have to click for hours around the different subsites. The menu for this can be found in the lower part of the page. After we finished the click-through-game, here a few info to the specific possibilities the portal is offering:

Free membership:

After a free registration on Dailymotion users can upload videos up to 2 GB and up to a length of 60 minutes - but only in SD-quality. Compared to that, YouTube only allows a video length of 15 minutes by 2GB of upload size. No restrictions on the amount of video content that can be streamed and watched. 81 videos can be displayed on the own site whith the help of the video wall. So the own user page is personalized and it’s possible to give other users an overview of the own content.

Official-Partner-Programme:

This programme is adressed to official partners like CNN, Universal or the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”. It’s been designed to reach a bigger audience. You mainly get further information and have the option to earn money. Partners are therefore more of a commercial type and no private persons, but basically everyone who filled out the application form and already has a Dailymotion account can participate. The benefits of participating in the partner programme are quite convincing: Videos are pushed by the platform on international websites as well as mobile devices. Furthermore officially pushed content is found much better in the platform’s search, which leads to a higher reach. Dailymotion ads are placed on the uploaded videos. As partner you participate from the advertising revenue. Income can be received everywhere where a partner is visible, means on the Dailymotion site or on blogs, pages of third-parties or social network sites. As soon as the advertising income is more than 100 Dollar, they are payed out by the end of the month.

Becoming a Motion Maker:

Dailymotion is adressing the creatives on their platform with the MotionMaker-feature. To take part you have to register for the official-partner-programme in order to have no upload limit. The MotionMaker can send their video content to the editorial team of Dailymotion which can then promote it as “starvideo”. It offers the possibility to be damn creative in the video sector and market the own video. Within the normal account you can choose between the notations movie maker, musician, comedian, reporter or extreme sportsmen.

Merchandise videos with Open VoD:

If you also want to merchandise your videos in other ways, you can sell or lend videos directly via Dailymotion or with the Dailymotion player on a different website, the open VoD programme is free of charge for video producers. Also it is possible to market live-events or live-channels and see the statistics for all videos. If you already have got a MotionMaker-account, you can take part in open-VoD without any problems. The producer gets 70 percent of the income. Dailymotion takes the rest for administration and distribution of the video. Payout is always by the end of a quarter.

Family filter:

These days the internet is available for as many people as never before. This also includes a group of users who aren’t full-aged yet. To protect exactly this target group of inappropriate content, Dailymotion set up the family filter. If it is set up, such content is separated out and cannot be found. Disadvantage: The filter can be switched on and of by any person.

Dailymotion games: “and action!”

Since this year Dailymotion is extending its video portal and provides a new live-stream-service named Dailymotion Games, which shall be used for broadcasting video games and E-sports-events. The platform discoverd the meaning of gamers within the video scene and wants to establish itself as competitor of Amazon’s Twitch with this extension. Currently the feature is only available as Beta-version. Further investments should follow to make it even more attractive to gamers and viewers. The extension mainly addresses lovers of the E-sports-scene. For example events like: League of Legends World Championships and the League Championship Series, the Dota 2-tournament The International, the StarCraft II World Championship Series, the world’s biggest LAN-Party DreamHack or the Intel Extreme Masters. With the Dailymotion app all videos on Dailymotion can be viewed every time.

A real YouTube alternative?
Dailymotion presents itself in a classical design but definitely can keep up with YouTube concerning the functions and features. The (professional) users are offered a variety of particularly free options to successfully market their videos and earn money with it. Viewers can subscribe to different channels of official partners and view chargeable content on demand. Only the user friendliness is lacking a bit. If looking for specific subsites or features, you have to click through the page. Tendentially more and more gamer are probably focussing on this portal. With a long-term planned extension of Dailymotion games, every game viewer or gamer benefits.