There has been a great deal of talk about how the mainstream media companies can compete with Google Inc.'s (NASDAQ: GOOG) YouTube. It is so much larger than any other video site that avoiding it as an online distribution mechanism may mean missing a large portion of internet multimedia users. But, companies like Viacom (NYSE: VIA) are not happy with users stealing their content and posting it on the huge video-sharing site. Nor are they able, apparently, to come to terms with Google for placing content there at a commercially reasonable rate.

A look at the new comScore figures on the top online video properties shows Google video sites, which includes YouTube, with a huge lead. These web properties originated almost 1.2 billion streams in May. Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) was second with 434 million streams initiated. Fox Interactive and Viacom Digital were in third and fourth place.

The road that most major media companies have taken is to syndicate their video properties to all of the large portals, sending content to Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL. But that may be a mistake. Merging their own video properties into one large platform could create a site with more video streams than YouTube, and the media companies could control the price, placing, and visibility of their own assets.

Negotiating the terms for creating one large site with the video assets of major media firms would be extremely difficult because the companies compete with one another. But stranger things have happened -- and indeed will have to happen if old media is to compete.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

MySpace, owned by News Corp's (NYSE: NWS) Fox Interactive Media, has become the largest social networking spot on the internet, and the company is taking steps to keep it that way by purchasing the photo-sharing site Photobucket for a reported $250-300 million.

Up until now, in order for MySpace users to embed photos and videos into their space, they had to first post that content on outside sites such as Photobucket and YouTube, then embed links to it. Photobucket holds a dominant share of that photo-sharing market (41%) and over 40% of the links to its content comes from MySpace users.

A couple of weeks ago, Fox Interactive Media (FIM) began to block content from Photobucket, accusing it of encouraging MySpace users to embed Photobucket-hosted content that carried an accompanying advertisement. If this was a negotiating tactic, it didn't seem to drive the price down much; News Corp is rumored to have dropped $250-300 million for the site.

The move will allow FIM to keep MySpace customers within the family fold as they upload content, thus avoiding the possibility that while on the Photobucket site they might be lured to try a competitor to MySpace.

FIM also announced a smaller deal to buy Flektor, a site that allows users to prep better user content by editing and mashing up their photos and videos.

While their initial plan is to maintain separate identities for the companies, I'd expect FIM to eventually fold both companies into the MySpace family to create a seamless one-stop shop. It also now has the opportunity to market MySpace to the reported 30 million people that visited Photobucket in March.

While the price paid seems steep, the race to integration has become a sprint, and all the big rollers have bought into the game. It's not a market for the thin of wallet or faint of heart.

Bill Miller, one of the world's greatest money managers, had his worst year in over a decade. His investments in eBay Inc. (NASDAQ:EBAY), Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN), and Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) killed his performance in 2006. But, he justified his Yahoo! holdings by saying the stock could go from its current $26 to $40 next year. Maybe his grief over losing all that money has clouded his judgment.

Miller thinks that Yahoo!'s new search technology for advertisers, the so called Panama Project, will drive both the company's earnings and its stock price. He has not made it clear why he thinks any advertisers would switch from Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG), which has almost the entire market and a product that works remarkably well.

It is also worth noting that in the November comScore numbers on Internet audience, News Corp.'s (NYSE:NWS) Fox Interactive passed Yahoo! to move into first place for total pageviews. (Fox Interactive pageviews include MySpace of course.) Yahoo! shareholders cannot be too happy about that. Google also made big strides forward as seen in the study.

Maybe Yahoo! should sell Panama back to the Panamanians.

Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.

New global audience statistics from comScore shows that Microsoft Crop. (NASDAQ:MSFT) still has an edge in total unique visitors to its web sites each month based on September 2006 figures. But that may not last long.

Worldwide, the Web had 726.7 million visitors in the age group over 15. Microsoft sites had 505.5 million unique visitors, followed by Yahoo!, Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Sites at 480.6 million and Google, Inc (NASDAQ:GOOG) Sites at 457.5 million. But, new Google acquisition YouTube had 81 million visitors, a jump of 12% from the previous month. Google may be in the lead when October worldwide numbers hit.

It is somewhat stunning how far other major companies lag. The Time Warner, Inc. (NYSE:TWX) Network had 217.8 million visitors in September, less than half of what the leaders boast. New Corp.'s (NYSE:NWS,NWS.A) Fox, which includes MySpace, sits at 117.8 million visitors.

The new numbers do point out one important thing, especially for Microsoft and Yahoo!. While Google dominates many things on the internet, it does not dominate everything.

If MSN and Yahoo! could build features that allow them to be more competitive than Google, or if they could do an M&A transaction to get a set of properties like Barry Diller's IAC/Interactive Corp.'s (NASDAQ:IACI) Ask.com Network, they could stay in the race. Ask had 112.8 million unique visitors worldwide in September.

Douglas McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.