Dailymotion have announced that it has weaned $34 million from investors pockets during its second round of VC solicitations.

The company was once a news maker solely for its hand in the illicit proliferation of copyrighted content, but has in recent months (or is it years?) made great headway to cast the image of its former self aside and put its best, non-illegal foot forward.

It’s achieved this by using its records of viewer numbers, among other figures, to attract legitimate licensing deals and to secure very significant sums of funding.

20% Of The Pie

To put the new funding announcement in perspective, according to a report by Red Herring, Dailymotion’s share of summer video-centric investments in Internet businesses came in at under 20 percent of the total pie. 

In all, venture funding had topped $200 million by the end of August. Hmm, can you say bubble?

A French creation, Dailymotion has slowly and silently been climbing the ladder of the video industry. Already, it is considered a worthy contender to YouTube on the European continent. 

Like a few others of its kind, it has been smart to try to forge ties with professional media outfits now so as to grow in appeal to larger numbers of visitors and return viewers to keep it in noteworthy contention with the biggest stars in the industry.

It has also been working to establish a semi-intelligent advertising system, in which it tailors its spots to cater most effectively to regional languages. 

Local Relevance Adverts

The company is configuring its website to display advertisements with “local” relevance as well, so as to avoid showing American viewers bits on products and services normally sold to Parisians.

As I said before, the video space on the Web is seeing quite a boom phase if there ever was one. 

Alexandra Berzon of Red Herring is right to characterize this moment in time a “craze”, particularly as the average forecast for 2010 of the total video-based advertising market is put at a relatively uninspiring $3 billion.

But this craze is an important one, as it is a precursor to the golden age of IPTV.

When one looks at the financials of sites like YouTube, Dailymotion and others, its easy to imagine that their continued losses only mean dark days ahead.

But what many fail to consider today is that advertising on the Web as a whole is relatively undervalued when compared to traditional venues, like print and broadcast television.

As soon as creations of the Web 2.0 era grow equal to and surpass similar forces in the old media space, ad space will be considered just as valuable on both ends of the spectrum. 

And with the current emergence of technologies that allow for intelligent and interactive advertising via the Web, the world of marketing may just considering in a few years’ time the Internet a landscape worthy of more dollars than ever were delivered to tangible publications and broadcast networks.

Paul Glazowski is a contributing author discussing the social networking world, his work can be found on Profy.com

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