It’s been some time now that the French press is watching closely every move Dailymotion is making, mainly because of the French government intervention last spring putting an end to the Dailymotion Yahoo deal.
Dailymotion and a few UK media announced several days ago a new partnership between the two parties consisting in Dailymotion appointing Yahoo Uk as its sole sales representative to serve web and mobile ads across its UK properties. With reported 9.2 million monthly unique visitors each month in the UK, Dailymotion has a strong youth audience with 51% of users aged between 15 and 34. The two companies have already had a successful similar partnership concerning Dailymotion’s Italian inventory for the last two years, therefore the signing of the new deal comes of no surprise. Furthermore, Yahoo has historically been involved in advertising sales since it’s creation. However some French media got really excited about this deal, as if Dailymotion and Yahoo desired a business partnership against all odds, which points out just how much the government’s failure by getting involved set out a precedent, still vivid here. So, I guess that was a good thing after all.
What is news however, is the group announcement of a brand new subsidiary office in Japan. Dailymotion Japan KK just moved to Tokyo with its first employees. With its 11 million unique visitors in Japan, the country represents the third largest market after France and the US with a strong audience growth in mobile in 2013. Although Dailymotion declared having had doubts at one point about the Japanese market as the online advertising sector was not so much developed, Cédric Tournay CEO declared: “ Japan is a priority market for us with an already strong audience, especially via smartphones. It is the logical next step for Dailymotion to consolidate its presence with a dedicated subsidiary in Japan that will be able to develop new networks and address other local issues.”
Opening in Japan highly interests Dailymotion as Orange ( parent company France Telecom) which owns 100% of the company recently invested 30 million euros with the business objective of hitting 100 million euros in revenue by 2016. In order to make that happen Dailymotion is also seeking to grow and develop in Europe as it has been confirmed they are in deep negotiations with an European company.
With 120 million unique visitors and 2.5 billion video views per month, Dailymotion is the first European site in all categories according to comScore (August 2013)