In the larger and multi-faceted face-off between Google and Microsoft, the Redmond and Mountain View giants compete on various fronts. And with MSN Video and YouTube, Microsoft and Google are in the race for the largest share of the online video market. So far, Google has positioned itself as an indisputable leader, after having dropped some $1.6 billion on YouTube at the end of 2006. While Microsoft has an equal opportunity to acquire YouTube, the Redmond company said pass and, instead, focused its efforts on pushing MSN Video and the prodigal son project, Soapbox on MSN Video.

At the end of September 2007, the prodigal son returned home and was completely swallowed and integrated into MSN Video. In terms of audience, the stand-alone website Soapbox was far from being a success; but, after it has migrated under MSN Video's umbrella, things seem to have turned around for Microsoft. According to the latest data published by Compete, the traffic of MSN Video climbed significantly in October.

"Extraordinary gains were realized by the Microsoft family of video sites, which includes MSN Video and Live Search Video, catapulting the Redmond rival into 2nd place, three spots ahead of its rank in September. MSN/Live Video grew 25.3% to 35M visits on the strength of 21M visitors. Meanwhile, major losses struck Yahoo! Video, MySpaceTV and Heavy.com. MySpace's decline is particularly troublesome given that it's the 3rd straight month of double-digit losses for the social networking giant. Since July 2007, MySpace has seen its online video market share halved to 7.6%," revealed Compete's Alex Patriquin.

An excess of 21 million unique visitors went to MSN Video and Live Search Video in October, generating over 35 million visits for 8.9% of the market. With this percentage Microsoft is now runner up on the online video market, behind Google, whose YouTube owns a share of 53.8%. "YouTube continued to outperform the market, growing 1% in October to 213M visits on nearly 52M unique visitors," Patriquin added.