French media holding company Vivendi revealed Monday it had acquired an 80% stake in French carrier Orange’s video-streaming site Dailymotion, in a deal worth about $241 million.
Negotiations had been underway since April, according to several reports.
The owner of Universal Music Group and pay-TV company Canal+ Group swooped in where Yahoo left off – Marissa Mayer’s attempt to acquire Dailymotion in 2013 crumbled due to French regulatory pressures. Vivendi was itself under pressure to improve shareholder returns amid talk of a possible sell-off of Universal Music Group.
Vivendi’s acquisition of Dailymotion gives it even more chops in video and TV distribution, since Dailymotion has about 3 billion video views per month and owns a programmatic video exchange called the Dailymotion Video Exchange (DMX).
The company earlier this month enabled server-to-server access for DoubleClick Bid Manager to DMX supply representing 300 million uniques and more than 1.4 billion impressions across publishers like National Geographic and Paramount on desktop, mobile, game consoles and connected TVs. Buyers are able to bid via an open auction or facilitate private deals through DMX.
Dailymotion already had a number of video demand-side platform deals in place, including with TubeMogul and a number of trading desks. Vivendi noted Dailymotion’s digital strategy parallels its own expansion efforts in over-the-top content distribution.
The monetization part was a major focus for Dailymotion.
“We are selecting the demand partners we are working with to cover all the advertisers and trading desks needs. … Because [of our] global audience, we are able to integrate really local and specialized DSPs but also global DSPs,” Dailymotion CRO Damien Pigasse explained to AdExchanger in a recent interview. “Our goal is really to be able to offer to our advertisers the ability to buy Dailymotion audience in real time.”
Correction: An earlier version of the story said Dailymotion had close to 3 million video views per month. That figure should read 3 billion, and has been updated.
