Six weeks ago, I linked to an article in the Washington Post about the shift from MySpace to Facebook. Here’s some data from eMarketer to support it.

This article in the Washington Post is required reading, especially if you’re involved in marketing to kids online.

The upshot: The MySpace crowd is moving to Facebook. This will probably speed up the exodus.

And guess what: As soon as you gear up that six-figure initiative to develop a partnership with Facebook? Those kids will have moved elsewhere.

Takeaway for marketers: The online audience is like a school of fish. They dart this way and that en masse, and dropping your bait into their midst is often the surest way to drive them away. Cast your net with care.

As the New York Post reports, Universal Music is rattling legal sabres at YouTube. Here’s another article from Playfuls.com about all this indicating it’s about a lot more than just YouTube.

This was certainly inevitable, and will be interesting to watch. Will a copyright suit against YouTube create an anti-Universal backlash among YouTube users?

Companies like Universal really need to think through their relationship with the online world. If someone gets a copy of a CD from a friend and makes MP3s of that CD available online for free or sells them for profit, then sure, that’s a clear case of copyright violation and they ought to get nailed.

But does a YouTube video like this of some kid lip-synching to a song that gets viewed 350,000 times take money out of someone’s pocket or serve as free advertising for that song to those 350,000?

Comedy Central really gets the online world, and programs like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report understand how to interact and welcome the online audience as opposed to antagonizing and shutting them out. Smart companies, I believe, will follow their example.

Takeaway for marketers: Place customers first and serve their wants and needs, you have a chance for a win-win. Place your company above your customers, it’s almost a guaranteed lose-lose.

Xanga, a MySpace type community that’s been around since 1999, has been fined $1 million by the FTC for violating the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). Here’s a C|Net article about it all.

Evidently Xanga was allowing accounts to be created even when the user declared that he or she was less than 13 years old.

According to their own media kit, which claimed 5.5 million unique visitors last November, their audience consists of 1.3 million kids 12-17, some percentage of which are 12, as well as 200,000 kids 2-11. According to December 2005 Media Metrix numbers, Xanga received 863,000 unique visitors from kids 2-11.

Is all this under-13 Xanga traffic online simply to visit the blogs of older kids? I doubt it. It’s kids updating their own Xanga blogs (which would mean they’re registered Xanga members) and visiting the blogs of friends in their same school grade.

That Xanga didn’t have “verifiable parental permission” to collect info from kids under 13 is what cost them the largest COPPA fine ever levied by the FTC. That they weren’t taking COPPA provisions into account in this day and age given that they have a significant under-13 membership is blithering idiocy.

Takeaway for marketers: Online privacy can’t be emphasized enough, particularly where kids are involved. If you operate a Web site that kids under 13 are likely to visit (even if it’s not a site specifically for kids), you need to be operating with COPPA in mind.

The latest Johnny Cash album was released July 4. Part of the marketing involves the MySpace page over here.

As a lifelong Cash fan, I’m happy to see that there have been more than 2.3 million plays of the songs posted on the page. It’s a little weird to see that Johnny has “104850 billion friends” on MySpace and to read a posting by “June Carter,” but the comments people have posted about Johnny and his music (6,331 as I write this) are, for the most part, flattering and on the mark.

All this from simply posting a few streaming songs and a notice of the release date. Not too shabby.