Comment (0)MSN today announced the U.S. beta release of Soapbox on MSN(R) Video, a user-uploaded video service that makes it easy for people to express themselves by uploading, discovering and sharing personal videos with the Soapbox community and others around the world. Soapbox will be available on MSN Video and will be deeply integrated throughout Microsoft Corp.'s (NASDAQ:MSFT) portfolio of online services, including Windows Live(TM) Spaces and Windows Live Messenger.So how does MSN compare to the most popular video sharing sites on the Net without Soapbox? Here are some numbers to show its relative popularity, courtesy of Hitwise:
Table 1: Vists for Top 5 Online Video Websites, Week Ending Sept. 16
| Rank | Name | Domain | Market Share |
| 1 | YouTube | www.youtube.com | 46.11% |
| 2 | MySpace Videos | vids.myspace.com | 20.86% |
| 3 | Google Video | video.google.com | 11.20% |
| 4 | MSN Video | video.msn.com | 7.09% |
| 5 | Yahoo! Video | video.search.yahoo.com | 5.36% |
| Source: Hitwise | |||
Table 2: Market Share of Visits for Online Video Sites for August 2006
| Rank | Name | Domain | Market Share |
| 1 | YouTube | www.youtube.com | 45.46% |
| 2 | MySpace Videos | vids.myspace.com | 22.99% |
| 3 | Google Video | video.google.com | 10.25% |
| 4 | Yahoo! Video | video.search.yahoo.com | 6.06% |
| 5 | MSN Video | video.msn.com | 5.92% |
| Source: Hitwise | |||
I'll review shortly, but I've got to be realistic. YouTube's got nothing to worry about, unless, of course, it starts purging illegally distributed, copyrighted content from its site.
— Phil Harvey, News Editor, Light Reading
