Dailymotion – The Alternative for UGC
Currently listed as number fifty one in overall traffic Dailymotion is one of the most popular user-generated content sites on the internet in the United States, and tops most others in European countries such as France as well as Japan, ranking at number eight and fifty-eight respectively. Despite ranking as low as number 85 in traffic in the United States, the site retains 15.5% of its page viewers from the U.S. out of a total of nearly 3 million visitors per day.
A video hosting service provider on the web, Dailymotion is based in Paris, France- the same country it gets most of its traffic from. Having registered it’s domain name only 1 month before YouTube, Dailymotion has garnered it’s fair share of the market of User Generated Content (UGC) sites, without imposing a monopoly. Having spread its self over a wide area in terms of marketing, Dailymotion is only blocked in three countries- Tunisia, China, and Turkey. What makes it even better, is unlike most other UGC sites who don’t care about major lawsuits that could bankrupt a company- YouTube, Yahoo!, Google, MySpace etc. – Dailymotion supports the new rules pertaining to anti-piracy.
Dailymotion’s involvement in the anti-piracy acts came about during a recent lawsuit involving a film producer in Paris, France who claimed Dailymotion hosted a version of his film “Joyeux Noel”. Dailymotion was ordered by a court in Paris to do something about its policies and also was fined. Recognizing the need not to fall to its knees in bankruptcy, Dailymotion along with a few other companies came together to create and form “User Generated Content Principles” . These agreements if adopted by lawmakers would impose strict regulations on UGC. Coincidentally, nearly all the major U.S. UGC sites failed to appear and since have still made no attempt to come up with similar ideals of their own. Interesting enough, Microsoft in an effort not to be dragged through the mud again was also part of the panel who made the Principles.
Dailymotion also was one of the first UGC sites to make an iPhone specific “companion” site, wherein iPhone users may still access online and available content to a certain degree. This in turn will boost daily visits and page views making it even more popular than it already is. Making sites even more accessible has been the norm for most popular sites as of late, and teaming with Apple to cater to a widely popular phone, Dailymotion has made its self available all around the world from anywhere.
Users can upload content at a higher resolution and size than most other UGC sites, allowing a resolution of 640×480 or 1280×720. Audio on Dailymotion videos are encoded as MP3 at 96 kbit/s in stereo compared to YouTube’s maximum 480×360 and mono sound. Also implementing a members service wherein registered users called MotionMakers have no resrtictions on file size or time limit. This is policed by Dailymotion’s Audible Magic digital sound fingerprinting system it recently implemented. Also, Dailymotion can stream HD video content as well, eventhough it is honest in stating that the quality is not what would be accepted as HD (still higher than standard definition however), further giving users with only HD content to post, the opportunity to post their content.
As of January 2008, Dailymotion was getting 16,000 new videos posted per day, with more than twenty-six million page views per diem. With all the UGC sites going around and the rising popularity of such sites, Dailymotion, unlike giants like YouTube is positioning its self to be around for a long time via its willingness to comply with the latest in copyrighted content detection (Knight), a feat only rivaled by the industry behemoth Microsoft. With its legal battles nearly over, and Dailymotion’s growing popularity, the long run model of UGC sites may be one day based on this rise to success.
