It might not have ever grown to be the size of YouTube, but Dailymotion is holding its own. The video site claims more than 110 million unique monthly visitors worldwide, including 30 million uniques in the U.S. Today, Dailymotion is rolling out a new homepage and redesign that it hopes will get more people watching videos, and for longer periods of time. It does that by putting videos front and center, and making them easier to discover and watch.
With the new redesign, Dailymotion is really trying to distinguish itself from other video sites, starting with the homepage display, which is just a wall of video stills, with endless scrolling to allow viewers to navigate through a wide range of video options. In addition, any of the videos can be clicked on and instantly viewed. There’s no jumping to individual videos, or navigating through an endless number of web pages to find something interesting. Just click and the video plays in-line on the homepage. Dailymotion has also limited the amount of pre-roll ads that will be displayed from that page during the launch.
Dailymotion also has added the ability to personalize the videos that users see on the homepage, by allowing them to select channels and genres of videos that they’re interested. Once selected, curated and trending videos from those genres will begin to be highlighted on the homepage.
The new design also has social features to let users more easily share what they’re watching with others, and to help grow viewership on the site. That includes integration with Facebook’s Open Graph and Timeline, which will instantly share videos with friends through the social network. Users can also Tweet out videos that they’ve liked to followers on Twitter.
While most will be exploring the new, never-ending scrollable homepage, Dailymotion has also rolled out a feed-type layout that users can toggle to, which displays an updated feed of video recommendations based on a user’s channels and genres.
Dailymotion hopes that the new design will increase viewership, or get people more engaged with its videos. That includes some premium content licensed from providers like FOX Sports, Hulu, HBO, and Showtime, as well as its own original content. Dailymotion started up its own “Motion Makers” program, which is competitive to YouTube’s original programming channels.
