New entrants to the video sharing market face a strong battle with dominant player YouTube, new figures show. 

Microsoft announced a beta test of its MSN Soapbox video sharing service yesterday, while Yahoo revealed that it was teaming up with CurrentTV.

Stats released from web monitoring firm Hitwise show that YouTube dominated the UK market with 60 per cent of visits to the top 10 video sharing sites in the week to 16 September, comprising one in every 400 UK internet visits.

Visitors spent an average of 17 minutes and 32 seconds on YouTube last week and the site captured more than twice as large a share of UK visits than Google Video which ranked second with 23 per cent market share (combined .co.uk and .com domains).

"Advertising-supported content has become a popular online business model and music companies are the latest to experiment with it," said Heather Hopkins, vice president of research at Hitwise UK.

"YouTube visits are eight minutes longer than average for all categories of websites. Coupled with the site's popularity, YouTube is a potentially lucrative platform for advertising."

MSN UK Video accounted for 1.71 per cent of UK internet visits among the top 10 video sharing sites last week.

The site received 63 per cent of its traffic from MSN UK's portal page, and 11 of the top 20 sites sending visits to MSN UK Video last week were MSN properties. 

The top 10 video sharing sites, by market share and session duration were:

1. YouTube 59.89 per cent 17:32 minutes
2. Google Video 16.63 per cent 7:14 minutes
3. Google Video UK 6.78 per cent 12:45 minutes
4. MySpace Videos 5.49 per cent 6:25 minutes
5. MetaCafe 2.90 per cent 10:05 minutes
6. Yahoo Video 1.92 per cent 12:26 minutes
7. Daily Motion 1.76 per cent 8:53 minutes
8. MSN UK Video 1.71 per cent 0:58 minutes
9. AddictingClips 1.58 per cent 6:13 minutes
10. AOL Media 1.33 per cent 4:46 minutes