Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

I cover this a lot more in detail on my show business blog, but the deal that Google is dangling in front of the big media companies has a lot interest to Internet marketers.

The first thing to learn from it, is that neither the big Internet companies nor the big media companies are close to figuring out how to put this all together to make good profits from it.

One Business Week writer mentions that essentially the $100 million Google (GOOG) is offering companies, which they're characterizing as "licensing fees," is really a payoff to buy time.

I completely agree with this. If you follow the entertainment industry at all, you know that pretty much everything they're doing at this time is to buy time as well. They simply don't have any idea how everything is going to play out.

That's one reason why I would be surprised if companies like Time Warner (TWX), Disney (DIS), News Corp. (NWS-A) and the rest don't accept the money and let things work themselves out.

To only sue concerning copyrights will bring them to the place where they could literally be suing themselves and their own futures. They've done some of that already.

Some of them are considering building their own web destinations by promoting and building a Web site destination for that purpose. The reason they may do that is because they may fear that YouTube will become the largest destination by far for people to go to, and they don't know if that's the direction they want to take.

If they accept the money, it gives them some compenation, and YouTube time to figure out the best way to fairly monetize their services for the benefit of everyone. If they don't accept it, they create a situation that is even bleaker in that they are still in the position of not having any vision of the future.

The bottom line seems to be that the media companies aren't used of being in this position. They aren't the ones that are in the position of strength, YouTube is. YouTube is running great without them at this time; they need YouTube more than YouTube needs them.

I don't see any other alternative, or else they could sue YouTube out of existence if they wanted, but how would it possibly help them?

YouTube's offer is to buy them time, while giving the media companies something in return. The ball is in the media's court.