Ternovskiy is visiting the U.S. and flirting with investors, and you can see why they’d want to talk to him. The 17-year-old spent three days in his bedroom building the site, named after a key scene in “The Deer Hunter,” and it attracts more than 30 million visitors a month.

He’s also savvy enough to tell everyone that he’s perfectly happy to go it alone. Though it would be easier for him to do that if Google (GOOG) would send him a check. He says the search giant won’t pay him his AdWords money because he’s too young.

Q: Do you want investors?

A: 
I’m not sure. There are a lot of business people that are interested. I am afraid to take the offers as I don’t have a business plan. If I take the money I’m responsible for delivering on that. Right now I can survive without investors. The site uses peer-to-peer technology and my Web site is not the kind of site that needs a lot of money to run.

Q: So if someone came along to you today and said I’ll give you $5 million for the Web site would you sell it to them?

A: 
I’m not sure to be honest. The thing is, I could take the money, but what if it won’t work well in the future, I would blame myself. I don’t want to disappoint people.

You should read the whole thing, which doubles as a very nice metaphor for the Web 2.0 era.

Which turns out not to have disappeared, after all. You can now launch a Web service that attracts millions of users without having to leave your parents’ house.

But if words aren’t your thing, here’s that excellent Jon Stewart clip about Chatroulette again.

The service is laying off the majority of its employees, and CEO Mike Volpi (pictured right) is out, replaced by Matt Zelesko, who had been SVP of engineering. The Joost.com portal site will stay open, but best to think of it as an ad for the company’s hosting and distribution services, which it will try to sell to cable companies and the like.

A Joost spokesperson declined to say how deep the layoffs will be; but I’m told that the company, which had more than 100 employees last fall, will be down to a couple dozen after the cuts are done. In a post on Joost’s Web site, Volpi said the company “will say goodbye to many of our colleagues and friends.”

This isn’t a shock: Joost’s fate has been the subject of whisper and rumors for the last year or more. The service made an initial splash in 2007 by raising $45 million from the founders of Skype and an array of high-profile investors and media companies, including Sequoia Capital and Viacom (VIA), and was initially supposed to deliver copyrighted content via a peer-to-peer distribution system and a player that users downloaded to their desktops.

But YouTube, and later Hulu, conditioned users to watch video via their browsers, and Joost’s software never caught on. By last fall, the company had retooled and began offering video via the browser like everyone else, but it has never been able to generate a significant audience. In November, a month after the company launched its Web browser, it said it was attracting 2.1 million unique users world-wide, a fraction of YouTube’s audience, and well behind rivals like Hulu, MetaCafe, Veoh and DailyMotion.

Here’s the service’s unique visitor count, per Comscore (SCOR); Joost’s unique viewer count, which is the more relevant metric for video sites, is considerably smaller (click to enlarge):

Joost has been a frequent candidate for buyout rumors, and the company hasn’t gone out of its way to deny them. The supposed buyers would be cable companies like Comcast (CMCSA) Time Warner Cable (TWC) or telcos like AT&T (T) and Verizon (VZ), which would presumably use Joost’s technical team to help build out their own Web video plays.

But some of the cable guys and telcos insist that they’re fine with the people they have. And if they do want to buy a video player, they have plenty of options: Just about all of Joost’s peers have been on the block, formally or informally, for the past few months.

JOOST TO PROVIDE WHITE LABEL ONLINE VIDEO PLATFORM

NEW YORK AND LONDON – June 30, 2009 – Joost, the online video startup, announced today that, along with Joost.com, it will focus on providing white label online video platforms for media companies, including cable and satellite providers, broadcasters and video aggregators. This technology and service offering will support content owners’ efforts to build comprehensive branded environments online.

Media companies around the world are embracing internet-based video portals as a key path to distribute their premium video, but building a world-class video portal is increasingly difficult and expensive. Joost will focus on this issue and provide the market with a cost-effective, end-to-end solution for media companies to publish video under their own brands.

As a part of this new direction, Joost will reorganize and restructure its business. A core team in New York and London will work on providing these solutions, as well as operating and supporting Joost.com and its associated video applications. Joost also will wind down operations in its Leiden development center.

Matt Zelesko, currently SVP of Engineering at Joost, will take over as CEO while continuing to lead the engineering organization. Stacey Seltzer, currently SVP of international business development and content acquisition at Joost, will run the business operations. Mike Volpi has stepped down as CEO of Joost but will remain actively involved as Chairman of the Board.

Joost plans to make its white label video platform commercially available to media companies around the world. This offering will provide a solution for companies looking to build a branded experience for their content on their own site as well as other sites and platforms in their distribution networks.

That’s the path that Jason Herskowitz has chosen. Old job: VP of product management at Total Music, Universal Music and Sony’s (SNE) attempt to create a service that offered either free downloads or free streaming music as a way to combat file-sharing. It collapsed earlier this year and Project Playlist bought some of its parts.

New job: VP of product management at LimeWire, one of the last (one of the only?) high-profile peer-to-peer file-sharing companies based in the U.S. Not surprisingly, the service was embroiled with industry lawsuits for three years running.

Here’s Herskowitz’s blog post announcing his new job and his pending move to Brooklyn (Welcome, Jason! Pretty sure we’re neighbors.) from Washington D.C. It’s not a crazy career move: A job is a job and there aren’t that many in digital music these days. Besides, I hear that LimeWire has nice offices.

Which reminds me: How is it, exactly, that LimeWire stays afloat when the labels have been able to force so many of its peers to shut down? Good question. I’ve asked around and heard murmurings that the labels and the file-sharing service may be able to work out some kind of agreement, but I’ve heard that every 12 months or so. So I’ll believe it in when I see it.

In the meantime, LimeWire continues to allow you to download just about any song (and many other things) you can imagine over the Web for free, without paying anyone a cent. Though if you do try to download a copyrighted song, you do get this stern warning from the service. I take it in the same spirit as the warnings head shops give you when they say the bong they’re selling is for tobacco use only (click to enlarge):

Digital music start-ups seem to come in two flavors these days: Those being sued by the major music labels and those with expensive licensing deals they can’t afford.

But for some reason, plucky Grooveshark, which runs a very nice, free streaming music service, has stayed out of both of those buckets until now. I’ve confirmed that EMI Music Group is suing the site–whose motto is “Play any song in the world, for free!”–for copyright violation.

The label filed suit against Gainesville, Fla.-based Grooveshark in a New York court on May 8. I don’t have a copy of the complaint yet, but if you feel like sharing, hit me at peter@allthingsd.com or use the blind tip box here. No comment from EMI, but Grooveshark sent me a very long statement, which I’ve printed at the bottom of the post.

The takeaway: Grooveshark says it was working on a licensing deal with EMI and now finds itself in court instead. The company does refer to deals with “many artists, labels and publishers,” but as far as I can tell, it doesn’t have deals with any of the other three majors–Warner Music Group (WMG), Universal Music Group, or Sony (SNE)–either.

Grooveshark started out as a peer-to-peer file-sharing start-up in 2006, and has since morphed into a streaming model. When I talked to marketing VP Joshua Bonnain in May, he told me the company was primarily funded by friends and family–most of the company’s employees are either students at or graduates of the University of Florida, he said. But he also said the company had received a “substantial investment from a large party” that he wouldn’t identify.

Bonnain said the site, which generates at least some ad revenue, planned on splitting half of it with the copyright owners of the music it played. But I was never clear about how that was going to work since Grooveshark doesn’t have deals with the majors. Then again, Bonnain didn’t tell me that the company had been sued a few days before we talked, either.

In the music world, negotiations don’t preclude suits and vice versa; Warner was, at one point, suing iMeem, but then became an investor in the site. Same thing with Universal and News Corp.’s (NWS) MySpace. The only real question I’ve had is why the big guys haven’t gone after Grooveshark yet. I’ve been asking label folks about the start-up since November and I’ve only gotten shrugs for an answer.

Anyway, as I said, it’s very nice service, and it would be a shame if the labels can’t figure out a way to work with it or help it survive. But the odds of that happening, based on the unpleasant history of digital music start-ups to date, are very low. So enjoy this themed playlist I created with the site’s help, which features music from all four majors, while you can. Grooveshark’s statement is below.

For the past year, Grooveshark has been in talks with EMI Records and other copyright holders to negotiate licensing agreements for the use of their content. We are pleased to announce that over the past few months Grooveshark successfully concluded mutually beneficial agreements with many artists, labels, and publishers that we hope to be a template for other such agreements with additional copyright holders.

Recently, EMI Records chose to abandon the template we’ve built with the help of other major copyright holders and opted for their traditional intimidation tactic of filing a lawsuit as a negotiating tool. We find the use of this negotiating strategy counterproductive, as Grooveshark has been willing to conclude an agreement with EMI Records that is economically sustainable for both EMI Records and a start-up company the size of Grooveshark.

Grooveshark is run by a group of young and passionate musicians. We love music, we make music, and we believe that the use of all music should be paid for. We adopted this core philosophy at our inception and to date have concluded agreements with hundreds of record labels, major US performance rights organizations, and thousands of independent artists who support Grooveshark’s business model. (See: Grooveshark Artists)

As musicians, we support the rights of copyright holders and strive to sign sustainable agreements with all content owners, ensuring that all artists get paid– or we agree to remove content from our system in accordance with our DMCA Takedown Policy. We hope that EMI Records eventually follows the lead of the many forward-thinking labels we are already working with, who would rather get their artists exposure and a fair share of our revenue than block content access and force customers to illegal networks.

We understand that the economy of the digital music business is in a state of flux, and we hope to help ease this transition by providing the required new tools and services that lead to the next generation of the music industry. We respect the ownership rights of the major labels and publishers, and our core mission has always been to compete with piracy by offering a service that is genuinely better than what illegal networks offer, while also ensuring fair payment to copyright holders. Our next important step on our road to success is to conclude a mutually beneficial agreement with EMI Records that is sustainable for both EMI and Grooveshark.