DailyMotion, the Paris-based video sharing site which enjoys considerable popularity in Europe, has been making progress in the United States, registering at number 17 in comScore's ranking of U.S. video sites in December.

In 2009, the site enjoyed a seventy percent jump in traffic in the U.S. with 12 million monthly unique visitors  consuming some 130 million videos per month.

Earlier this week, I spoke with Joy Marcus, head of DailyMotion's operations in the U.S. and Canada.  She says that the company seeks greater market share and is planning a sizable marketing effort to make this happen.

I spoke with Joy at the AlwaysOn conference after she participated in a panel on online video moderated by Peter Kafka.

Beet.TV keeps it visibility up on the Continent with its channel on DailyMotion.

Andy Plesser, Executive Producer

Video Transcript

Andy Plesser:  You guys are doing great in Europe and what's happening in the States and North America for you in terms of the advertiser reach and in terms of the consumer reach and where might that be going this year?

Joy Marcus:  We're doing great. So in the US market we had about 70% growth year over year this year. We're at about 12 million uniques in the US. That, among video viewers, that is about 10% reach. So that's pretty significant reach in the US market. I think, you know, when we launched the site we were really nowhere, so seeing really exponential growth in the US market.

We've become a "go to" player for advertisers, part of the video buy, which I think is quite significant. I think one of our key challenges for this year is to build an even stronger consumer presence and brand presence in the US market, which is something we're quite focused on. People are finding us, but they don't necessarily know our brand that well and I want to change that this year.

Andy Plesser:  So how are you going to do that? How are you going to raise the visibility for the brand?

Joy Marcus:  Uh, we have lots of marketing plans, obviously, but I think just getting our message out, which is quite clear to the very very loyal user base that we already have, loyal and growing user base that we already have, which is all about quality video on the web.

So, you know, some of our competitors are excellent search engines and excellent aggregators of video and you know more power to them; they do a fabulous job. I think what we do better than anyone else in the market is help users discover the best of web video and sort of bring it to the forefront, program it for them, lead them from one video to another in a way that makes sense to them.

So, for example, our Comscore engagement metrics compared to our competitive set are through the roof. And I think that is a function of how well we program our site. Once someone finds us, they love us. My line to my staff is basically "To know us is to love us."

I think one of our challenges is continuing the growth this year. I'd like to see even higher than 70% in 2010. Seventy percent was fabulous. So aggressive goals for 2010 and making consumers understand the message so that they actually come looking for us.

Andy Plesser:  So tell us a little bit about the multi-platform strategy that you guys have going.

Joy Marcus:  It started in Europe. We have a distribution deal through SFR, formerly Neuf TV, which is a leading cable provider, so it's a connected TV distribution for our service in France. Very popular, generating a lot of traffic for us, a lot of monetizing traffic for us. We are on Fios TV in the US and we are on the Sony Bravia internet link, so we're already distributed on connected TVs in the US and in an IP TV environment in the United States, and that's about to get much much bigger this year.

New TVs will be shipping with our destination embedded. So they're connected TVs that are being distributed by the likes of Samsung, one of the leading TV manufacturers in the world and in the US. So we're really going to be pretty much fully distributed on connected TVs and on platforms like Boxee and Roku that connect TVs for those who may not actually be purchasing a new TV this year.

We also just launched an iPhone app. We've always had a very iPhone compatible version of our website and now we have actually an app. 

Andy Plesser:  Speaking of the cutting edge, you guys have been embracing the open video movement, at least in a sort of experimental way. [Yes, yes we have] YouTube has, in a certain respect; they announced a couple of weeks ago. What is the opportunity for HTML5?

Joy Marcus:  You know, the jury's out on it. It's fabulous, it doesn't require download, it is readily available to anyone, it's a great platform. We were among the first, I think maybe the first, to develop an HTML5 player. Ours is the only one that is compatible right now with every browser that takes HTML5. I think we all know we have this sort of IE issue with HTML5 that I think will be resolved pretty quickly. And we're gonna watch and see. See what user adoption is like, how many people switch over on our site. If any volume occurs in that we're going to take it very seriously. We are going to be looking to make sure that the user experience is as good or better than it is in Flash, and we are going to be mindful of advertiser needs within the player for HTML5. So I think it's extremely early and at the forefront, we believe in open, we're a strong advocate of open, and we just wanna, we also just want to give users and markets, our two primary clients, if you will, what they need.