By ReutersInformationWeek
"We are confident that we could be profitable in a few
months," CEO Mark Zaleski told the Reuters Technology, Media and
Telecoms Summit in Paris on Monday.
Launched in the French capital in 2005 at around the same
time as YouTube, Dailymotion is now one of the country's top 10
most visited Web sites. It overtook its Californian arch-rival
in France in February.
Dailymotion only started selling advertising in July last
year but said it expected to make more than 10 million euros
($15.60 million) in revenue this year.
In March, the site had 36.2 million unique visitors a month,
which compared with 287 million on YouTube and 74 million on
Facebook, according to Comscore.
Fuelled by increasing bandwidth, video is one of the fastest
growing areas of the Internet but its explosion has also created
challenges for measuring viewership.
Dailymotion makes money principally from advertising and
product placements. Zaleski said the business was looking to
stay independent in the near future.
NO TALKS
He said companies and investors had made informal approaches
in the past but no concrete buy-out talks were ever held. He
also denied French media group Lagardere had ever courted the
business.
"We are not actively looking to try and sell the company,"
Zaleski said. "We are in growth mode. We are past the start-up
phase and now in the consolidation and monetisation phase."
The company says it is different from YouTube partly because
it actively promotes producers and artists, makes editorial
judgements on the videos it hosts and on its front page and
offers high definition videos.
"We are an alternative to YouTube," Zaleski said. "People
would not give us the time of day a year ago. Now we are getting
all the attention."
Popular hits this year viewed by more than a million
included French President Nicolas Sarkozy telling a bystander at
a farm fair to "get lost" after he refused to shake his hand.
Zaleski said the company was more interested in improving
its features than distracting itself with mergers and
acquisitions.
He said it was now thinking of doing sponsored shows that
would be exclusive to Dailymotion.
Dailymotion's three founders own 21-22% of the
company while the balance is held by individual investors and
private equity firms.
The biggest shareholder is Partech International, followed
by Atlas Ventures, Advent Venture Partners and AGF Private
equity, a member of the Allianz group.
Since its inception, 32 million euros ($49.53 million) in
cash has been injected into the business.
It raised 7 million euros in 2006 from Partech and Atlas and
another 25 million euros in 2007 from the same private equity
firms and from Advent and AGF.
Like YouTube, the site is divided into different sections
such as music, sports, travel and animals. It is available in 15
languages, including Turkish, Greek, Russian, Korean, Japanese
and Chinese.
(For summit blog: http://summitnotebook.reuters/)
By: Astrid Wendlandt
Copyright 2008 Reuters. See original article on InformationWeek
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