Video in France: Dailymotion holding out against YouTube

ComScore has published a survey of online video for the month of May, and, surprisingly, France shows noticeably different trends from the four other countries studied.

Google's domination, in France and elsewhere, is well-known.  The search engine now owns YouTube, the biggest site for uploading video, and supplied 28% of the videos watched online in France.

By comparison, Google's market share is 45% in the UK, 44% in Canada, 38% in Germany and 34% in the US.  The weaker performance in France is mostly caused by the strength of a local competitor, Dailymotion, which supplied 15.5% of the videos seen in France.

The study's other key finding is that, while Google and Dailymotion have the largest market shares, they do not have a complete majority.  So, while the third player in the market, French television channel TF1 only has 1.5% of the audience, the combined share of the two giants is only just above 43%.  This means the majority of clips are available here and there on a host of different sites.  It seems that even if users plump for YouTube or Dailymotion to find something to watch, they prefer to go directly to a specific site if they already have a video in mind.

More surprising, though, is the sheer number of videos watched in France: 2.3 billion.  That makes 93 videos per user, and 25 million people (81% of French Internet users) have watched a least one clip online in the past month.  The average user watches three per day.

It is important to remember that these statistics do not take into account downloads to mobile phones, although ComScore estimates that 3.2 million subscribers have watched at least one video on their phones.

> ComScore press release