Lots of interesting, hardcore business activity going on in and around social media properties this week. One has to wonder whether the dot com, focus on the future, profitability be damned mentality is back. There is a land rush going on to acquire these valuable properties while they are still young and (relatively) cheap.

Yahoo CEO Terry Semel was recently asked by Fortune Magazine about My Space and You Tube,

MySpace and YouTube have also built huge audiences in areas where
Yahoo should have had a leg up. How did that happen?

They’ve grown quickly. But Yahoo has very large audiences in the youth demographic too. For example, in what we call social search, our new product Yahoo Answers already has north of 50 million users.

We spent the first half of this year building video infrastructure throughout our network – in sports and in news, for example. You can count on Yahoo taking video to the next step.

Translation: We blew it. We are playing catch up.

In an attaempt to alter its business model and open new sources of revenue, today You Tube announced that it had entered the pay for placement market,

Millions of would-be starlets attempt to grab fans and fame each day on free video sharing site YouTube. But on Tuesday, the site began accepting payment for sky-rocketing videos to a prime spot on its home page.

One so-called “participatory video ad” will be featured each day on the site, and can be rated like all other YouTube videos. The first such ad was paid for by Warner Music Group to promote a new album by Paris Hilton. News Corp. advertised a television show in a banner ad atop the Warner video ad.

This makes sence since the company CEO went on record last month as saying the comapny wasn’t profitable.

Today I also came across an interesting post by entrepreneur Robert Young explaining why Apple should buy You Tube,

…with a rumored asking price of $1 billion, NBC Universal was the most likely contender to buy YouTube.

But buying YouTube, Steve Jobs could leapfrog to the top of the heap. After all, he would end up with immediate presence within the ranks of the top 50 web properties (one that’s still growing at a rapid clip).

YouTube would also, for the first time, give Apple a platform to tap into the highly-coveted stream of online ad revenues, particularly within the fast-growth, high-CPM video ad segment. And by owning a leading platform for user-created content, distribution, and social networking, Jobs could fill in nearly all of Apple’s strategic holes (vs. web competitors) in one fell swoop.

How would You Tube do this? By attracting the incredibly powerful ‘tween market, that’s how,

Enter YouTube. The online video phenom can be to the video iPod what iTunes was to the audio iPod. It’s not difficult to imagine mass consumers, especially tweens, downloading their playlists of YouTube “video snacks” and viewing them on the go with their video iPods.

If you want to learn more about the whole social media phenomenon, what it means and who is driving it forward, check out friend of Topaz, Paul Gillin, who has started publishing draft chapters to his soon to be published book The New Influencers on his blog. From the looks of it, it is going to be a fascinating read. And very new media of him to post draft chapters online and solicit feedback from the very folks he is writing about.

The Internet’s fever swamps are getting crowded yet again.

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