In an interview to the French news magazine Capital, the new CEO of Dailymotion revealed some breaking news :
- the company just raised 15M€ - it looks like an inside round
- Dailymotion is now breakeven
The first part is not really surprising and I would argue that the existing investors didn't have much choice. The second information is much more surprising. In 2007, Dailymotion lost 14M€ on a revenue of 4,8M€ - these are the official numbers filed by the company at the 'registre du commerce'.
Let's extrapolate from the interview that the revenue grew 50% both in 08 and 09 that would mean around 10M€ revenue for the full year 2009. That would be an amazing performance knowing that the internet advertising market is flat or low growth in 2008 and 09 and that the ranking of dailymotion has been dropping constantly over the last months (see below the worldwide ranking of dailymotion.com from Alexa).
In the meantime, to be breakeven, management would have had to cost cut by 2 from ~20M€ a year to ~10M€. That is possible but difficult. At the same time, Credit Suisse estimated that Youtube is losing ~500M€ a year, showing it is very difficult to be breakeven in that business
Either we missed something in the above analysis, either Cedric de Tournay is being very positive in the media to give a positive spin.
Frederic HALLEY
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