 |
|
|
|
This is Part 1 of our coverage of the September 2000 Digital Kids conference, the largest annual gathering of people in commercial Web publishing, marketing, gaming, e-tail, and other businesses targeting kids (here are Part 2 on "guerrilla marketing" to kids, Part 3 on connecting home & school, and Part 4 highlighting new sites for kids)....
'Digital Kids': The big pictureWe hope the children's Web publishing business isn't going through the kind of consolidation we all saw in kids educational software and CD-ROMs - with less variety and creativity and fewer products - but there were signs of it at Digital Kids last week.
DK is an annual conference where hundreds of people who create content for, interact with, gather data on, and market to online kids and teens every day, all day, gather each hear to get a feel for where their industry's going and what peers are thinking about young Net users. We attend not just for the kids', parents', and teachers' resources on display but for what we and our readers can learn about how online kids are perceived and how they're being marketed to.
The number of attendees seemed about the same, but there were noticeable changes from last year, signs that certainly confirmed it's a wild, woolly world out there in cyberspace! Since the April '99 tech-stocks correction, not as many new faces have appeared either on the Web or at Digital Kids as in previous years. Many familiar ones either were not nearly as visible as in the past or didn't even come - SurfMonkey.com, MaMaMedia.com, JuniorNet.com, Headbone.com. The highest profiles were those of large conventional-media companies - Disney, Mattel, Fox, Cartoon Network, and Children's Television Workshop (just renamed SesameWorkshop) - and deep-pocketed less famous companies such as Knowledge Universe (publisher of the new KidsEdge.com) and Learning Network (from Pearson Plc, an international media company that just acquired FamilyEducation.com and owner of the Financial Times and Penguin books, among others). These signs reminded us of the consolidation in educational software that led to fewer Reader Rabbits and more Hot Wheels and Barbie.
So it was great to see intrepid young Web companies exhibiting at the conference: YourOwnWorld.com, Ask Jeeves for Kids, The Children's Internet, Zeeks.com, MainXchange.com, Aprendiendo.com (from Mexico City), and KOLA.net. More on these and other new and enduring resources for kids in a couple of weeks.
What all of us got was a wide-angle snapshot of where online kids are at the moment. There will be 26.9 million 2- to 18-year-olds online in North America alone by the end of the year, according to Jupiter Communications (these are some of the less conservative numbers you'll hear). Data gatherers at Media Metrix say the number of teens online (representing about 12% of the online population) nearly doubled in the past nine months, 50-50 girls and boys. They go online once every 3 to 3.5 days on average, spending 303 minutes online a month - surprisingly far less time than adults, who are online 631 minutes a month (details in Cyberatlas). Search, email, and instant messaging/chat are the top 3 online activities for teens in general. Tops for boys is downloading free software; No. 1 for girls is e-greetings (email postcards).
Girls communicate and shop (or browse in e-tail sites) on the Web more than boys. They mostly frequent the Web versions of familiar offline "brands" (a "brand" can be anything from a camera to magazine to a musician). The sites they go to most are Seventeen.com (the magazine), Alloy.com (online community/e-tail site with a clothing catalog), dELiAs.com (ditto), Teenpeople.com (the youth spinoff of People magazine, now on AOL, relaunches on the Web in November), AE.com (American Eagle Outfitters), iTurf.com (teen portal and parent of dELiAs), Nsync.om (the boy band's site), Abercrombie.com (Abercrombie & Fitch clothing), Lyrics.com (music portal), and gURLpages.com (free home pages for girls, courtesy of gURL.com, another child of iTurf.com, which appears to have the formula down!).
Boys have specific Web destinations in mind, according to Media Metrix. They surf the Web at large more than girls do, but when they go to individual sites it's for specific information. Overwhelmingly, that information is "cheats" - tips on how to advance in or win offline games, usually Nintendo or Sony console games. Here are their Top 10 (in sheer traffic): Cheat Code Central, CMGSCCC.com, gamesages, OHHLA.com (for "Original Hip-Hop Lyrics Archive"), Gameshark.com (retailer of console game accessories), Gamefaqs.com (a very personal, grassroots-y game-cheats site with an "original Internet" feel to it), Nintendo.com, Gamewinners.com, Cheatplanet.com, and Game-Revolution.com. It's hard for us to believe that only one of the Top 10 is a non-game-related site! Are you surprised? Tell us!
Whether or not your household or classroom reflects these generalizations, it may be interesting to see what teens' Web-using interests say about teens' interests in general - at least those in countries with high Internet usage numbers. But tell us what your children's/students' favorite Web sites are (or ask them to tell us). It'd be fascinating to know if the interests of our subscribers' children contrast with those above.
An important session at the conference updated us all on regulation for kids' Web publishers and marketers. Besides the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) now protecting kids' privacy and safety ("Privacy and safety do come together under COPPA," said cyberlawyer and online-privacy specialist Parry Aftab), there are some new technologies Web sites are using to keep kids safe. They include: drop-down message text (also called "pre-programmed chat," where a child picks from phrases the site provides), "session cookies" (technology that keeps kids from clicking back in the registration process so they can't lie about their age), and random ID (where a child picks or is assigned a new screen name each session - no permanent one by which s/he can be identified). For examples, CartoonNetwork.com uses the former and Sesame Workshop's Sticker World uses the latter. Yahooligans! (Yahoo! for kids) now has the first kid-safe instant-messaging service. And the FTC, charged by the US Congress to enforce COPPA, has teamed up with Lycos's kids' site, Lycos Zone, to create a cartoon video to help kids themselves maintain their privacy online. It's the kids piece of the FTC's ongoing public-awareness Kidz Privacy Campaign.
Kids' Web publishers say there are advantages to greater kids' privacy regulation: parents' trust ("It has always been important to us that parents feel CartoonNetwork.com is a safe place to be," said CN's Jim Samples) and a parameters for kid-safe publishing ("Legislation is good," said Yahooligans!'s Catherine Davis, "we now have a framework. Just as in the offline world, you have to get parents' permission if you want to talk to kids"). What's tough about COPPA for Web publishers is the cost of compliance. One figured quoted early on by Ms. Aftab in an FTC hearing was $75,000+ - a large figure for a young company. Zeeks.com had to turn off chat, finding it too expensive to provide under the COPPA rules (see TheStandard.com article linked to below for more on this). Regulation must be one of the pressure points in the industry consolidation we're seeing.
Here are two reports from other media outlets:
- "The High Cost of COPPA" from TheStandard.com
- "Kids' Sites Cite COPPA Woes" from Wired News
That's the overview. Next: a look at what marketers are saying about teens - insights into both worlds, advertiser and teen Web users, that we found quite fascinating. Part 3: The home-school connection on the Web. Part 4 will look at great Web sites for kids - new and old friends.
HOME | newsletter | subscribe | links | supporters | about | feedback
