French media giant Vivendi has announced plans to breathe new life into its Paris-based social media platform Dailymotion by wooing content creators. Speaking to newspaper Le Figaro, Maxime Saada, who is CEO of both Dailymotion and Canal+ Group, said the ambition is to recruit around 5000 creators by the end of 2024.
Launched in 2005, Dailymotion has been something of a pioneer on the French digital landscape – and has also established a presence in 145 countries worldwide. However, it has struggled to compete with Google-backed YouTube and, more latterly, TikTok. Currently, the platform has 400 million active users a month globally compared to YouTube’s 2.5bn and TikTok’s 1.7bn. Saada hopes that the new creator-led strategy will help the company grow to around 1 billion monthly users by 2026.
Vivendi took full control of Dailymotion in 2015 and has tried to relaunch it once before in 2017. At that time, Saada decided to prioritise premium content at the expense of user generated content. Now, like many of its digital-first counterparts, the platform seems to be pivoting back towards a creator-led advertising model.
Currently, Dailymotion has around 200 creator partnerships with the likes of Verbozz, Mr ContraDico, Loïc Roussel and Expresso Critique. The goal now is to create a more robust creator ecosystem and share ad revenue.
In addition to targeting creators, Vivendi plans to revamp Dailymotion by giving it new user features. For example, the platform’s algorithm will be able to analyse the sentiment score of a video and recommend complementary or contradictory videos accordingly. There will also be new comment and voting functionalities.
