In terms of U.S. market share among video-sharing sites, Veoh is in sixth place, and in June, it received $26 million in funding. Just ten days ago, Metacafe, the eighth place site, collected $30 million. And now Dailymotion, which is in tenth, got $34 million. Um . . . right.
These developments sort of make sense - after all, YouTube doesn’t need a dime in order to maintain its dominance, while some major changes are needed for any of these sites to get noticed. Still, one has to wonder if investors’ tens of millions of dollars couldn’t be put to better use elsewhere.
Oh, well - it’s not my money. And as Peter Sayer of the IDG News Service pointed out, Dailymotion is doing reasonably well in some regions. “DailyMotion still reaches more viewers in its native France than does YouTube . . . but its lead is narrowing,” he wrote. “Both companies attracted more viewers overall, to the detriment of smaller players in the market.”
It’s also refreshing to see that Fred Destin, a board member at Dailymotion, has some perspective on the whole situation. Instead of a typical we-are-the-best-at-everything comment, he states, “The race is on as to who can provide the most credible alternative or threat to YouTube: the new pirates at Veoh with the Eisner and Freston connections, the Metacafe guys, or us. Today we are in the lead, but this is a marathon and not a sprint.”
$34 million should buy Dailymotion some damn good running shoes. Hat tip to (and initial stats from) VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon.
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Comments
Ah the ranking battles :-)
Ben at DailyMotion also obsesses about his ranking month-on-month, tweaks the pages to get a slightly better navigational here or there and tracks what that does to length of visits. All great and part of the programme. The battle of the statistics is a bit tiring, eveyone stating the month that suits them best etc. The reality is simple: both DailyMotion and Metacafe are very proactive on the copyright infringement front and as a result removed a ton of videos, which is having an impact on their growth in the US. My personal bet on recent trends and site centric videos as is that we at DailyMotion are quite a bit ahead of our respected competitors at Metacafe, but that Veoh is now probably ahead (US only). As far as copyright protection goes (and whilst I am delighted and impressed that they are taking a strong legal stance) Veoh seem to be doing nothing more than what the law requires i.e. responding to takedown notices. But somehow no one seems to care much :-) Must be the Eisner halo effect ...
PS thanks for the nice plug
Site rankings
Hi Doug,
I would encourage you to cite your source for rankings. Although all the 3rd parties understate traffic dramatically, we have found comScore as the best source. Most recent US numbers from comScore Media Metrix have Metacafe at 6.2M, Daily Motion at 3.1M, and Veoh at 2.8M. (July monthly unique visitors.)
Thanks,
Allyson Campa, Metacafe
Hitwise
Thanks for reading. Those rankings came from Hitwise, by way of Eric Eldon (the last link in my article), and also correspond to July. Hitwise puts the U.S. market shares of Dailymotion, Metacafe, and Veoh at 0.76, 1.09, and 1.57 percent, respectively.
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