August 29, 2012, 1:04 PM — Video site Dailymotion hopes to show its visitors more videos with a redesign of its homepage that appears to draw inspiration from the checkered interface of Windows 8 and Windows Phone and the bottomless lists of Twitter and Facebook's new timeline.
The company plans to show the new homepage to between 10 and 15 percent of visitors this week, starting Wednesday, completing its worldwide rollout by the end of September.
"We're trying to improve discoverability," said Dailymotion's U.S. Managing Director Roland Hamilton. "We have millions of videos, and we want our homepage to reflect the breadth and depth of content we have."
Dailymotion has carved a place for itself in its native France, in second place behind Google, according to figures from market researcher comScore -- and is also something of a hit in Turkey, according to Hamilton -- but it has some catching up to do in the U.S.
The company claims to show 1.8 billion videos to 110 million unique visitors worldwide each month -- but according to comScore, market leader Google (owner of YouTube) showed 10 times that many in the U.S. alone. Google showed 18.3 billion videos to 155 million unique U.S. visitors, followed by Yahoo with 51 million unique U.S. visitors watching 718 million videos, according to comScore. Next came Facebook, VEVO, Viacom Digital and Microsoft. Dailymotion didn't even make comScore's top 10 in the U.S.
Hamilton, though, is proud of the engagement shown by Dailymotion visitors. In France in January, they watched an average of 7.4 minutes of each video, compared to just 3.6 minutes per video for visitors to Google's video sites, according to a report from comScore.
But that same report shows why Dailymotion wants its visitors to watch more videos, not just more of each video: comScore said that Dailymotion's 18.7 million unique French visitors watched an average of 14.3 videos each, while Google's 34.6 million unique French visitors each watched almost five times more.
About a third of Dailymotion's video views are prompted by promotion on its homepage and about 10 percent from internal search, according to company figures, making the homepage the obvious place to look for more video views. Between a third and a half of the videos are viewed offsite, embedded in other pages, with the rest viewed onsite, driven by external search engines and links.
Two aspects to the new layout were demonstrated to IDG News Service.
In one view, tiles of different sizes make up a checkered pattern of stills from the videos, each accompanied by a few words of description. Clicking on a tile plays the video in place or, for the smallest tiles, enlarges the video to cover an adjacent tile too.
