• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, April 10, 2017

Dailymotion, the Vivendi-owned video site far better known overseas than in the U.S., is planning a relaunch. It aims at an audience that YouTube doesn’t seem to emphasize: full-fledged adults.

According to story from the New York Post, Maxime Saada, CEO of Vivendi’s French Canal Plus Group and Dailymotion chief, says Dailymotion will be seeking U.S. partners--including telecoms.

It’s pointing its videos at 18-49s and 25-54s. It’s hard to say YouTube doesn’t have that huge swath of the population covered, too, but YouTube seems to bend toward far younger viewers. As the Internet has aged along with the population, the older population forms a good target who are, in some ways, hidden in plain site.

Supposedly, Dailymotion also believes there is a market in exporting European stories and locales to the rest of the world, especially if the rest of the world is defined as the United States.

A newly energized Dailymotion could be bothersome to YouTube because 80% of its views from outside the United States and it’s available in 76 languages.

In reality, it’s not in the same league.

The NYP says Dailymotion has 300 million unique users who consume some 3.5 billion videos and 500 million of those plays occur on this side of the Atlantic.

But YouTube claims 1.3 billion users who watch 5 billion videos a day — and has a packet of other stats that demonstrate, pretty clearly, that there is a lot of space between themselves and just about anything else in the world.

With YouTube’s problems with advertisers over racist and violent content, the presence of an established alternative might be interesting. For sure, YouTube probably has never been more controversial with marketers that it is now, though Dailymotion has had its problems. It spent part of the last year removing sexually explicit videos from its site.

According to an earlier story in European publications, Dailymotion hopes to be a kind of curated video site, guiding its viewers to premium content in specific topic areas, including, news, sports and entertainment. In that last category, Vivendi also owns Universal Music Group. Its videos are licensed to Vevo for its own site and one it operates on YouTube.

The relaunch is due to happen in June, when there is a major media conference in Cannes to showcase the French-owned channel's new way of walking. Per the NYP, Saada is in New York now trying to line up ad support.

pj@mediapost.com