Before you get mad at me and leave nasty comments, this isn't my idea. Yahoo! Sports writer Dan Wetzel has actually suggested that kids who play in the nationally-televised Little League World Series should be paid $1,000 per game. I'm not kidding. Here's a quick summary of his reasoning:

1. Advertisers and the networks (and the non-profit Little League Inc.) make a lot of money from the event -- and the kids are the ones who play.
2. Many of these young athletes come from developing countries, and a few thousand dollars could go a long way toward providing educational opportunities that they might otherwise miss out on.
3. The event has already been corrupted: "There has long been cheating in Little League, from doctoring birth certificates to playing out-of-district ringers."

Here's the problem with these arguments:

I participated in a panel discussion at a conference on Saturday with a couple of young, smart, geeky teenagers -- i.e., the absolute center of most marketers' universe. These girls, Iris and Sheena, were the very definition of "early adopter" and "Generation Y" all rolled into one, a tiny yet brilliant focus group on the future of technology, social networking, and the internet.

Someone asked if Iris had a blog, and she said, "I hate to say this, but [pause] MySpace." She and Sheena both related how they checked out their MySpace accounts daily to see if friends had tried to contact them. For the two of them, both from lower-income families and members of under-represented minority groups, their technology lives consisted of homework, their podcasts, and MySpace.

If I were less of an analytical sort, I'd immediately say that MySpace is clearly winning the social networking arena. The site has the teenagers! What's more, it has hours each day of attention from these girls, from my youngest sister, my babysitter -- all of the 13- to 25-year-old demographic, really. But then I thought for an instant more, and I realized that Iris and Sheena were both the perfect example of MySpace's market domination and the reason why Microsoft, AOL, and Google will always win the race for ad dollars.

There's no money in these teenagers' MySpace behavior.