Dailymotion to be profitable soon: CEO
PARIS (Reuters) - Dailymotion, a French online video sharing company gnawing at the heels of Google's (GOOG.O) YouTube, expects to be profitable soon and cash-positive in early 2009, its chief executive said.
"We are confident that we could be profitable in a few months," CEO Mark Zaleski told the Reuters Technology, Media and Telecoms Summit in Paris on Monday.
Launched in the French capital in 2005 at around the same time as YouTube, Dailymotion is now one of the country's top 10 most visited Web sites. It overtook its Californian arch-rival in France in February.
Dailymotion only started selling advertising in July last year but said it expected to make more than 10 million euros ($15.60 million) in revenue this year.
In March, the site had 36.2 million unique visitors a month, which compared with 287 million on YouTube and 74 million on Facebook, according to Comscore.
Fuelled by increasing bandwidth, video is one of the fastest growing areas of the Internet but its explosion has also created challenges for measuring viewership.
Dailymotion makes money principally from advertising and product placements. Zaleski said the business was looking to stay independent in the near future.
NO TALKS
He said companies and investors had made informal approaches in the past but no concrete buy-out talks were ever held. He also denied French media group Lagardere (LAGA.PA) had ever courted the business.
"We are not actively looking to try and sell the company," Zaleski said. "We are in growth mode. We are past the start-up phase and now in the consolidation and monetization phase."
The company says it is different from YouTube partly because it actively promotes producers and artists, makes editorial judgments on the videos it hosts and on its front page and offers high definition videos.
"We are an alternative to YouTube," Zaleski said. "People would not give us the time of day a year ago. Now we are getting all the attention."
Popular hits this year viewed by more than a million included French President Nicolas Sarkozy telling a bystander at a farm fair to "get lost" after he refused to shake his hand.
Zaleski said the company was more interested in improving its features than distracting itself with mergers and acquisitions.
He said it was now thinking of doing sponsored shows that would be exclusive to Dailymotion.
Dailymotion's three founders own 21-22 percent of the company while the balance is held by individual investors and private equity firms.
The biggest shareholder is Partech International, followed by Atlas Ventures, Advent Venture Partners and AGF Private equity, a member of the Allianz group (ALVG.DE).
Since its inception, 32 million euros ($49.53 million) in cash has been injected into the business.
It raised 7 million euros in 2006 from Partech and Atlas and another 25 million euros in 2007 from the same private equity firms and from Advent and AGF.
Like YouTube, the site is divided into different sections such as music, sports, travel and animals. It is available in 15 languages, including Turkish, Greek, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
(For summit blog: summitnotebook.reuters.com/)
