From Techcrunch, last week:
At first this announcement appeared to be a good candidate for “News of the Weird:”
Microsoft Officially Retires Soapbox, The Poor Man’s YouTube
by Leena Rao on July 21, 2009
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.
…. Even this past week, Microsoft chose to use YouTube for its Bing Jingle contest.
After thinking about this for a bit, I realized it’s yet another business model for $0.00.
Yes, Microsoft is diluting its own brand value by broadcasting a jingle contest for its new search product via Google’s YouTube – but at the same time it’s using – for free – Google/YouTube’s bandwidth, and its user traffic – to draw attention to its competitor for Google Search.
Hmm. I wish I could view those Google Analytics.
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Tags: youtube, economic downturn, whom the bell tolls, chris anderson, google search, corporate vice president, soapbox, cable free
