Dailymotion: YouTube’s Arch Nemesis

It’s fascinating to consider that whilst Hurley, Chen and Karim were building YouTube, many miles away in Paris but only one month later, a couple of Frenchmen were coming up with their own equivalent.

In March 2005, Benjamin Bejbaum and Oliver Poitrey founded Dailymotion in Poitrey’s living room with less than US$10,000 from 6 separate investors.

The video sharing site cruelly dubbed “the poor man’s YouTube” and “YouTube’s dark alter ego” may not report numbers as impressive, but this is still no niche player.

Dailymotion counts 137m unique visitors per month (compared with YouTube’s 1b) and in 2013 had a bid by Yahoo blocked (by the French government, concerned about foreign ownership).

Then in June 2015, French multinational media company Vivendi purchased 80% of Dailymotion, at the not so insignificant valuation of $295m. But it all began in 2005, just a month after YouTube kicked off their own simultaneous journey to greatness.