Microsoft Is Insignificant Compared to Google

On the online video market, there is Google, and then there are the rest. And Microsoft is just one of the anonymous crowd, elbowing away for a few meager percentages of audience that fall off as crumbs from Google's YouTube feast. With in excess of 75% of Internet users in the U.S. having watched an online video fragment in November 2007, Microsoft's websites fail to gather a crowd. In the end, when it comes down to both streaming video and progressive downloads, Google's dominance is incontestable, YouTube having a market share of 31.3%.

"Americans viewed nearly 9.5 billion online videos in November, with Google Sites once again ranking as the top U.S. video property with 3 billion videos viewed (31.3 % share of all videos viewed), 2.9 billion of which occurred at YouTube.com (30.6 %). Fox Interactive Media ranked second with 419 million videos viewed (4.4 %), followed by Yahoo! Sites with 328 million (3.5 %) and Viacom Digital with 304 million (2.6 %)," comScore revealed.

Meanwhile Microsoft sites, which essentially refers to MSN Video, and the included former beta project Soapbox, served just 181 million videos in November 2007, accounting for just 1.9% of the market. By comparison, YouTube offered 2.9 billion videos for 31.3% of the eyeballs. Google also leads when it comes down to the volume of unique users. With an unique audience of 76 million, Google captured a share of 41.8% of all users. Microsoft is barely at 15.6%, having attracted just 28.4 million visitors.

"In total, 138 million Americans - approximately three in four U.S Internet users - viewed online video in November. Google Sites also captured the largest online video audience with 76.2 million unique viewers, followed by Fox Interactive Media with 46.3 million and Yahoo! Sites with 37.3 million. 74.5 million people viewed 2.9 billion videos on YouTube.com (39 videos per viewer)," comScore added.