A French video-sharing website is taking on the might of YouTube by offering content which caters specifically to local viewers - an area the internationally-minded YouTube may have overlooked.

DailyMotion.com, which is based in Paris, has more than 9,000 new videos posted each day, and its daily page views now exceed 16 million.

The majority of the videos on the site are French - one of the most popular is a recent television interview with the Presidential contender Ségolène Royal - but the site also has posts in English, German, Spanish and Italian.

Having an avowedly ‘local’ identity was something that appealed to countries with a strong sense of language and culture, such as France, analysts said.

Users were also likely to be drawn to the site’s unique features, such as the ability to stream directly from a webcam - a capability YouTube doesn’t have - and upload videos from mobiles.

"There’s definitely potential for new players in the market which feature locally produced content," said Annelise Berendt, a senior analyst at Ovum. "These sites depend upon on users forming new relationships and networks, and in that setting people would rather be communicating in their own language."

YouTube also has a foreign language section, but when ‘French’ is selected, the site’s main interface remains in English.

Europe-wide, DailyMotion attracts about 2 per cent of the total video-sharing audience - well behind the market leader YouTube, which has 12 per cent - but in France the site eclipses its better known competitor, attracting 10.3 per cent of users, according to the online analysts comScore.

Even among British users, the site is the 6th most popular video-sharing site, putting it behind YouTube and MySpace but ahead of Yahoo! and MSN Video Search.

"Out strategy is totally international," said Benjamin Bejbaum, DailyMotion’s CEO. "We are closer to French content but I want to see content from every country."

In the past three months, DailyMotion has seen its share of the UK market increase threefold to 2.3 per cent. Google Video’s share, by comparison, fell by 16 per cent - to 7.8 per cent - over the same period, according to the British-based online research company Hitwise. YouTube is still the dominant leader with a share of just under 70 per cent.

"The site seems to appeal mostly to young (18-24 year old), male university students in London and the South East," analyst Heather Hopkins, an analyst at Hitwise, said.

Its increased traffic may also be explained by a deal with the French TV station TV1, for which the site has developed a portal where users can post and view videos. The best are broadcast each week on the station.

DailyMotion is one of a number of sites in the video-sharing category which are challenging YouTube both by offering users new incentives.

Revver, an American site which has just launched in the UK, splits its advertising revenues 50/50 with content providers, promising a small fortune for creators of videos which become widely viewed.

One user recently made $30,000 when his video of an elaborately staged ‘Diet Coke and Mentos’ experiment was viewed hundreds of thousands of times.

Metacafe, a site set up by a former Israeli air force pilot, uses "quality control" as its selling point, rejecting about half of all videos submitted on the basis that they are duplicates, and ranking the remainder using an algorithm which takes into account whether a video is typicallly watched to the end, among other criteria.

This enables the site to promote "good" videos, its owners said.

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