If you haven't heard about DailyMotion.com, you probably will fairly soon, particularly if you're one of those people who wants to watch commercial-free television shows for free. I stumbled upon the video-sharing site via by brother, who read about it on Forbes.com.
So who is DailyMotion? Well, they're based in Paris and there does not appear to be any ways they make money right now: no advertising, no sponsored links, nothing. The company, which received seven million euros of venture capital from Partech and Atlas Ventures, has 18 employees, although some of them could be part-timers or volunteers as opposed to full-time staff. The company's two founders are Benjamin Bejbaum and Olivier Poitrey.
According to Forbes, DailyMotion's traffic has tripled in the past three months, albeit off a small base given it only has 0.22% market share compared with 65% for YouTube. (I'd insert an Alexa chart but you barely be able to see DailyMotion on it.)
With DailyMotion running complete TV shows, the question is whether it's violating copyright laws. Forbes quoted someone from the Electronic Frontier Foundation that DailyMotion could be protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's "safe harbor" provision, which lets sites host infringed content if they aren't aware of it, don't profit from it and remove any infringing content immediately upon the copyright holder's request. I suspect DailyMotion may start getting more of these copyright holder requests once its profile starts to grow. In the meantime, have fun. I'm off to watch some "My Name is Earl" episodes as we speak.
Note: You can read an interview with Bejbaum on seomoz.org