The last big video sharing alternative to YouTube has a history of picking up seedy content that the video giant won't touch. And Yahoo is interested.
Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo is in talks to purchase a controlling stake in France Telecom SA's Dailymotion, a video sharing site that's been called, among other things, "the poor man's YouTube."
The company, which was founded one month to the day after YouTube, calls itself the number two video site on the Internet. It's one of the last mainstream vestiges of user uploaded video content outside of Google — a role Dailymotion has been able to hold onto, at least in part, by hosting content YouTube won't touch.
For Yahoo, the Dailymotion acquisition would be CEO Marissa Mayer's largest deal to date, and could mean a bigger presence in Europe for the company. It would also bring onboard a property that's far cooler — or, at least, better known — than Yahoo's current video portal, Screen.
From a traffic standpoint, Dailymotion is a formidable site. In fact, in 2011 Google DoubleClick's Ad Planner listed it as the 44th most visited site on the Internet. According to comScore, Dailymotion attracts 116 million monthly unique visitors to YouTube's 1.2 billion. (In terms of views, however, YouTube accounts for 28% of globally, while Dailymotion accounts for just 1%.)
Size aside, the biggest difference between the two sites is Dailymotion's longstanding reputation for being far more lenient with both copyright and prohibited content.
Though Dailymotion introduced a fingerprinting program to combat copyright violations in 2007, the site gained a reputation in online communities for being less stringently policed than YouTube (particularly when it came to TV shows). As a result, Dailymotion has come under scrutiny from content providers, especially in France.
The contrast is most stark when comparing the prohibited content guidelines of the two companies. While YouTube's policy broadly bans all pornographic content with few exceptions, Dailymotion has a far more nebulous policy, banning only child pornography, "dangerous or illegal acts", and a limited range of sexually expicit content and features a "Red Band" or "sexy" section.
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