YouTube understandably has many, many would be competitors. Some many make it big some day, many won't. But interestingly, a French video-sharing site called Daily Motion has emerged from the heart of Old Europe with 9,000 new videos pouring in each day and daily page views surpassing the 16 million mark.


Can it be true? Oui!

Recall that France has a strong cultural and linguistic identity and loves to make French versions of everything. According to Business Week, Daily Motion (www.dailymotion.com) actually was online before YouTube.

For those competition jockeys who want to know, YouTube already has managed to grab 9.1% reach in France compared with 10.3% for Daily Motion (according to figures from market tracker comScore). Across Europe, YouTube has around 10% to 12% reach, vs. 2% for Daily Motion. About half the video clips on Daily Motion are in French, with many of the rest in English.

I have at least one friend in the advertising industry who said to me just yesterday that he wished that he could pay a reasonable monthly subscription in order to watch high-quality French television fare. Maybe this is just the ticket for him.

This helps demonstrate a trend that I expect will become more pronounced in the years ahead: video sharing Web sites acting more like brand aggregators in a similar fashion as television networks do today. Think about it, on TV if you want to find something for your child to watch, you tune into the Cartoon Network, Disney, or Nickelodeon without much thought.

So, Daily Motion also could benefit from this trend if it becomes the undisputed francophone video-sharing destination.