Microsoft Officially Retires Soapbox, The Poor Man's YouTube

Tuesday, July 21st, 2009

Leena Rao currently works as a writer for TechCrunch. She recently finished graduate school at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, where she studied business journalism and videography. From 2004 to 2007, she helped lead Congresswoman Carloyn Maloney’s community outreach and relations efforts in New York City. She graduated from Columbia University in 2003, where she was... → Learn More

Microsoft’s YouTube clone Soapbox is officially shutting its doors, according to reports today. Soapbox, which was launched in 2006 as a hub for downloading and sharing user-generated videos, was never able to be a viable competitor to YouTube.

MSN corporate vice president and chief media and technology officer, Erik Jorgensen, said that Soapbox delivers less than 5 percent of the overall 480 million video streams worldwide on MSN Video each month. In June, MSN Video posted its best month ever, with 250 million streams. But this nothing compared to YouTube’s streams which top around 1.2 billion per day.

Earlier this month, Microsoft hinted that it may be reevaluating Soapbox as a property and possibly be scaling back the site. Even this past week, Microsoft chose to use YouTube for its Bing Jingle contest.

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