This month’s online video stack-up saw a major reshuffling with 3 of the Top 5 players trading places amid heavy shifts in traffic. YouTube continued to outperform the market, growing 1% in October to 213M visits on nearly 52M unique visitors. The Top 20 video sites as a set contracted 6% 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%.

At Yahoo! Video, unique visitors held relatively steady while visits declined 27.5%. The drop indicates that visitors to Yahoo! Video were less inclined to return than they were in September and August.

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Taimur Asad (The Microsoft "Wow" Blog!)