Dailymotion have announced that it has weaned $34 million from
investors pockets during its second round of VC solicitations.
The company was once a
news maker solely for its hand in the illicit proliferation of
copyrighted content, but has in recent months (or is it years?) made
great
headway to cast the image of its former self aside and put its best,
non-illegal foot forward.
It’s achieved this by using its records of viewer numbers,
among
other figures, to attract legitimate licensing deals and to secure very
significant sums of funding.
20% Of The Pie
To put the new funding announcement in perspective, according
to a report by Red
Herring, Dailymotion’s share of summer video-centric
investments in
Internet businesses came in at under 20 percent of the total
pie.
In
all, venture funding had topped $200 million by the end of August. Hmm,
can you say bubble?
A French creation, Dailymotion has slowly and silently been
climbing
the ladder of the video industry. Already, it is considered a worthy
contender to YouTube
on the
European continent.
Like a few others of its kind, it has been smart to
try to forge ties with professional media outfits now so as to grow in
appeal to larger numbers of visitors and return viewers to keep it in
noteworthy contention with the biggest stars in the industry.
It has also been working to establish a semi-intelligent
advertising
system, in which it tailors its spots to cater most effectively to
regional languages.
Local Relevance Adverts
The company is configuring its website to display
advertisements with “local” relevance as well, so
as to avoid showing
American viewers bits on products and services normally sold to
Parisians.
As I said before, the video space on the Web is seeing quite a
boom
phase if there ever was one.
Alexandra Berzon of Red Herring is right
to characterize this moment in time a “craze”,
particularly as the
average forecast for 2010 of the total video-based advertising market
is put at a relatively uninspiring $3 billion.
But this craze is an
important one, as it is a precursor to the golden age of IPTV.
When one looks at the financials of sites like YouTube,
Dailymotion and others, its easy to imagine that their continued losses
only mean dark days ahead.
But what many fail to consider today is that
advertising on the Web as a whole is relatively undervalued when
compared to traditional venues, like print and broadcast television.
As soon as creations of the Web 2.0 era grow equal to and
surpass
similar forces in the old media space, ad space will be considered just
as valuable on both ends of the spectrum.
And with the current
emergence of technologies that allow for intelligent and interactive
advertising via the Web, the world of marketing may just considering in
a few years’ time the Internet a landscape worthy of more
dollars than
ever were delivered to tangible publications and broadcast networks.
Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com
