Vevo launches in France, Spain and Italy with 50K new videos

Vevo, the #2 video site in the US, broadened its European expansion with launches in France, Spain and Italy after kicking-off its expansion last year in the UK.  Given that Vevo was founded out of a partnership between the music majors Universal and Sony, YouTube and Abu Dhabi Media Company, their positioning focuses on licensed music content, offering a vast array of official videos and concerts. This content, which will add 50k new videos to Vevo’s repertoire with this launch, will be made in available in France first via Vevo’s site and iPad/smartphone apps and at a later stage via an optimized mobile internet site and Xbox.
All though Vevo has only been partially available in France since early 2011, its videos have been made available to the French public via its YouTube channel.  According to Le Figaro, this has enabled Vevo to enter the French market in a position of force as it’s the number one music ‘site’ online in terms of audience (150m views/month).  In August alone, more than 6 million French viewed one video on Vevo’s channel.  According to Médiamétrie, this was even better than Deezer which attracts approximately 4.9 million monthly visitors.
It will obviously be interesting to see the impact that this will have on Dailymotion, which is still currently France’s #2 video site.  We’ve written before about how Dailymotion has been overpowered in recent years by YouTube, which clearly has been able to tap into its global dominance, strong brand, and considerable ‘Google resources’ to become the standard bearer in France’s online video market.  This situation was probably inevitable in any event, but Dailymotion’s partial and then full acquisition by Orange has likely done it no favors.  With Vevo entering the market with substantial resources at its disposal, Dailymotion is probably a bit concerned about now.  Although Vevo ‘only’ focuses on music, a significant chunk of what people watch on video sites is music related (e.g. approx 31% in a 2010 survey on YouTube).
Vevo already has a strong head start in this area and, as such, it’s not a stretch to assume that they’ll attract a good portion of new viewers from Dailymotion as well as others.