YouTube's Next Challenger

5:40 PM -- As noted in our Video Sharing report last month, Microsoft is adding video sharing capability to its MSN video portal:

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