Well, my guest tonight is the Chief Executive and co-founder of an independent website that looms large in the shadow of Youtube. Benjamin Bejbaum, thank you for joining us here on France 24

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Thank you for your invitation.

Raphael Kahane:
Your company, Dailymotion, is a Paris-based video-sharing website which ranks second only to Youtube in on-line traffic. I’d like to begin by asking you: what is the main difference, for the average user, between Youtube and Dailymotion?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

There is, first, a difference in history. We were created in March ’05, so when we created Dailymotion, we were the first video-sharing website worldwide.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Youtube didn’t exist back at that time?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Youtube existed but from the history later on. Youtube started to work; Steve Chen and the other guy started to work together in January but the website was live in May. Since we started, at the beginning, we didn’t have a business idea with this software, with this platform, we put it live on the web the first night of its creation. It was in March ’05.

 

Raphael Kahane:

And in terms of an average user, if I decide to go on to Dailymotion, do I have the same services? Are they different, between Youtube and Dailymotion?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Yes, so this was the historical difference, but then there are very big strategic differences. First is the fact that we were localised in the beginning. The website was English and French. We chose to use both languages from the first day of its existence. Okay? Now, today, we have 17 different languages for Dailymotion.

And there is a second difference, which is our creative approach. We try to make a big distinction on the website between Personal Videos and Creative Videos. What is the difference? A Personal Video is something you make for your friends and family, so you don’t have a creative positioning – you just try to tell a story to your friends and family. You don’t try to reach a larger audience; you don’t mind if one thousand people watch your video. You just want to send a simple message to a close circle of friends or family people.

Creative Videos: it’s when you try to make something more. You try to do interviews, you try a short movie, to create an animation, but you want to reach a larger audience. So one of our biggest jobs, in every country where we are present, is to find these guys and make them sign up on Dailymotion and use the website.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Okay. You’re pretty broad-based, but I think your main focus is Europe, originally.

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Our main focus is the world for the moment. Fifty per cent of our traffic is worldwide; only fifty per cent is French. I know it’s big, but we say only fifty per cent. Then we have the US, the UK, Italy, Belgium, Canada, Japan, a lot of other countries. We chose to work directly in four countries, which are: France, the US, the UK and Germany. We have a partnership with Telecom-Italia in Italy and we’ll go where the traffic is.

 

Raphael Kahane:

What led you to decide to create this company?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

It’s a need! It came from a need. In fact in 2000 I created a hosting company called Iguane Studios. In 2005 I was running this company, so I had some technical capacity in this company. I made a small trip to New York in January ’05 and I came back with videos, and I started to edit these videos. And then the need arose to share these videos, and it was the first time that I wanted to share a video. Blogs existed – blogs are platforms to sharing text, snippets, okay, so you can put a text somewhere and share it with people. There were some photo-sharing platforms, like Flickr, which is the bigger one and perhaps the most impressive. But there was nothing for video. In fact there were things for video, but before sharing your video you had to encode it on your PC, so this was a very big technical difficulty for a lot of people. So with Olivier, we started to work on something that would enable anybody with any technical competence to share their video.

 

Raphael Kahane:

So you wanted to share your videos, but how did you know that there was a pre-existing demand for this kind of video-sharing offering?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

If you look, everybody has a camera-phone. Okay, everybody has a digital camera and they’ve existed for – I don’t know – four, five, six years, maybe, so for the last four years, any digital camera has had a digital recording capacity. So people had this digital recording capacity, they had broadband access because broadband is rising, but there was no place on the web to share this media asset. So of course the demand was there. In fact when we created the website, we opened the tap.

 

Raphael Kahane:

So, as opposed to Youtube, which was Google’s prize purchase last year, Dailymotion remains essentially independent. How do you plan to finance your development in coming months?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Ah… we’ll raise the money. We had our second fundraising in August, where we raised 25 million, with very big private equity funds. Thanks to them for this, for their trust!

And of course with monetisation. We started to sell advertising back in April ’06. We chose to have an internal media sale in France, so that’s been live since May ’07 and it’s September so it’s working very well; it’s where we based our growth.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Just coming back to the amount of money you raised through venture-capital funding, what will you do with the money? Do you have plans already?

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Ah, we have plans already. We plan to pursue and to continue our strategy, the strategy we put in place two years ago. And first, it’s product investment. Dailymotion is based on a website that works well, so it has to continue. It’s not just about making the thing and then going on to something else. A product is a perpetual improvement, so there is a lot of work going into the product platform.

Then, we have to go into countries, so we set up the US, the UK, Germany and we’re going to set up a few other European countries in the next month, in the month to come.

 

Raphael Kahane:

When you see that a big company such as Microsoft is ready to invest 240 million dollars for just a 1.5 per cent stake in Facebook, which actually values the company at 15 billion dollars, don’t you think that they might be paying too much money for a company that has as yet to become profitable?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

I cannot judge this so easily. There is a real market for companies; sometimes a web company brings more than just EBITDA the next year to the company that will buy it. So I guess that the Microsoft guys know what they are doing if they are buying in this company.

 

Raphael Kahane:

But more generally, as a market insider, don’t you think that investors are being maybe a bit too optimistic about business prospects for these start-ups?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Optimistic, for sure. Too optimistic, I don’t think so. The market is growing, more and more people are equipped with broadband and digital recording capacity, more and more people know how to use internet, so I don’t see why it would decline.

 

Raphael Kahane:

For a company like yours, like Dailymotion, how long is it going to take until traffic translates into advertising revenue?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

It’s already started. I cannot give you the exact figure, but the revenues that we had in September, which was the first real month of media sale in France – it’s twelve people in France selling the ads – it was really encouraging. We’ve reached our forecast.

 

Raphael Kahane:

What about profits?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Profits? We think next year, probably.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Next year, probably. Okay, well, the fast development that your company and other similar start-ups have experienced in the past years has called for a class of seasoned managers to be recruited to help the founders. Could you tell us what Mark Zaleski, the former manager of QXL Ricardo, brought to your company, since you recruited him at the end of the summer?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

He brought a lot of seniority to the company. He’s a very experienced guy, who worked in and managed to make QXL a very efficient company. We have a lot of ideas. We are very creative, but we needed someone like Mark in the Dailymotion management team to bring more seniority.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Is it the edge of maturity, with a company like yours?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

I think so, yes.

 

Raphael Kahane:

And now a controversial issue for a video-sharing website is the question of property rights. Earlier this year, Dailymotion lost a lawsuit for carrying a copyrighted clip of a French film, which cost the company 30,000 dollars in damages. Do you consider that the decision was fair and justified?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

There was something very fair and justified in the decision: it was the first sentence, which says, in French: “Dailymotion est un prestateur technique”, which means that Dailymotion is a hosting company. This was the first sentence of the outcome of the judgement and this was very fair.

 

Raphael Kahane:

So you don’t consider yourself a publisher or an editor. You’re a hosting company.

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

We accept a publisher role, on a very framed place on the website: it’s the homepage, and this Motion Maker Videos, the Creative Videos. On 98 per cent of the website we are a hosting company because we have no impact on the content. So the thing we are doing right now is that we are using technologies, emerging technologies like fingerprinting, to protect content.

 

Raphael Kahane:

So that’s mostly what you’ve done since then to prevent copyright infringement?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

We haven’t started, er… We didn’t wait for this trial before starting to protect content. I mean, we are working with creative people. It’s in the DNA of Dailymotion to work with people who spend time or invest time and money creating content. We are not on the one hand going to promote those guys and not try to help the content providers. So since the website’s beginning we’ve had some ways for the content providers to ask us to in[put] the content and we do it very efficiently. But now we’ve implemented technologies -- integrated and implemented technologies -- like Audible Magic in the US, INA in France, […] technologies which allow us to detect very efficiently the copyrighted content.

 

Raphael Kahane:

You’ve also signed agreements with publishers, including a landmark agreement recently in the US. Could you tell us more about this agreement? 

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Concretely, this agreement has been signed […]with CBS, with Disney, Fox, Microsoft, Viacom, Myspace and NBC Universal. So we are the only European website present in this deal. It’s not a content deal; it’s a good principles chart[er] where everybody says: “We’ll respect you and we should do this to continue to respect you”. Because there is no law imposed today on the editor to implement fingerprinting, and we think that it would be better, without waiting for the laws to be implemented, to do this, to adopt these good principles between content providers and editors.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Is it part of your marketing offensive to gain market share in the United States? Because actually Youtube didn’t sign this agreement.

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

 

It’s not a marketing offensive. I mean, this could have happened two years ago but we were only beginners. Okay, and now we are big enough to speak to Disney, to the big guys and we spent a lot of time at the MPAA in Los Angeles to tell those people that we know we have something to do to protect their content. And this is what we do.

 

Raphael Kahane:

How do plan to develop, precisely, the content on Dailymotion? Through partnerships? Your recently signed partnerships with Turner Broadcasting Europe, with the US producer, RDF, with Universal Music, Warner – do you plan to develop more partnerships in the future?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Completely, in fact, we have three kinds of content on Dailymotion. We have what we call UG [content], Personal Videos. We have Creative content – that’s the content that I was speaking to you of before, done by the Motion Makers, like Sony Amateur. And then we have the Premium deals. Premium deals, which is like Universal – we’ve signed with Universal, with SPPF, we’ve signed with Turner, a lot of other deals are coming in, yes, indeed.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Aren’t you concerned that some of the users that have been following you from the very beginning might think that you’re losing your soul by signing agreements with publishers?

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

It would be true if we were to impose this content onto the users. But we don’t. We never do this. I mean, if users want to see content from Viacom, Universal, they can go to the homepage, they search for the keyword and they will find it. If they want to go to their own page and only have the content of their friends, they can.

 

Raphael Kahane:

Okay, well, thank you very much for joining us here on The Business Interview, Benjamin Bejbaum. I remind our viewers that you are the Chief Executive and co-founder of Dailymotion, the video-sharing website. Well, thank you very much for joining us here on France24.

 

Benjamin Bejbaum:

Thank you.

 

Raphael Kahane:

That’s it for this week’s Business Interview. Stay with us, on France24.

 

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