Startup Watch: Dailymotion is Coming to America

Dailymotion, the popular France-based video site, is doing a publicity push today to declare its U.S. presence, following competitor YouTube coming onto its home turf as part of the U.S. leader’s international expansion last month. Dailymotion has had a customized homepage for the United States since March of this year, and a generic English-language version predating that, but recently it’s made some key hires, cut a few deals, and most importantly has brought itself into compliance with U.S. privacy and copyright laws.

Yesterday we were tipped off to trouble at Dailymotion resulting from pressure from lawsuits scaring off potential buyers and ending up in an emergency bridge financing loan. A different source, who asked not to be identified, verified the bridge loan but claimed it was simply part of a very large funding round that the company is currently closing. A U.S. spokesperson assured us the lawsuits were insubstantial and restricted to Europe. So we’ll have to see how that all shakes out.

Last week (prior to the disputed claims detailed above), we spoke with Joy Marcus, who formerly did international business development at MTV Networks and is now leading the Dailymotion U.S. team, about the local site’s progress.Marcus said Dailymotion, which comScore recently noted has taken a foothold in the U.S. with 4.7 million video streamers in April, is seeing early U.S. success due to its unique channel programming strategy. However, channels like “news,” “fun,” and “politics” are hardly unique to Dailymotion, so we’re not yet convinced.Marcus said the U.S. site had launched its first advertising using ad network Tribal Fusion last week. Dailymotion is looking to add in-stream ads, and eventually user revenue sharing.

Meanwhile, Marcus is working on cutting deals with major content holders, armed with the site’s just-launching Audible Magic fingerprinting tools (which we had problems with in the past, but she promises are effective).

Dailymotion has signed a couple of “co-production” deals, one a contest with sketch comedy producer Jim Biederman that wraps up this week, and another yet to be launched with a reality show producer.

The site isn’t winning the feature war for now. For instance, competitor Metacafe already has revenue sharing and joint productions live on its site. But success in online video isn’t all about features; traffic is king.