Web Playgrounds of the Very Young
LOS ANGELES — Forget Second Life. The real virtual world gold rush centers on the grammar-school set. — Trying to duplicate the success of blockbuster Web sites like Club Penguin and Webkinz, children's entertainment companies are greatly accelerating efforts …
Context & Ripple Effects
The adult virtual-world story had been souring all year: marketers were having second thoughts about Second Life by July 2007, and its user base skewed foreign, with Europeans outnumbering Americans three to one as of May. Meanwhile the growth was visibly elsewhere — June's coverage of doll web sites driving girls to stay home and play showed how sticky toy-linked worlds had become.
This piece names the consequence: children's entertainment companies are accelerating builds aimed at the grammar-school set to chase Club Penguin and Webkinz, whose blockbuster numbers made them the template. The gold rush isn't leaving virtual worlds — it's changing who they're built for.
First-order effects
- Children's entertainment companies shift development budgets toward kid-oriented virtual worlds, treating Club Penguin and Webkinz as the benchmarks to duplicate rather than experiments.
- Club Penguin and Webkinz become the reference properties every new entrant measures against, raising the bar for what counts as traction in the category.
Second-order effects
- Toy and property owners are pushed toward the Webkinz pattern of bundling physical products with online worlds, since the proven winners monetize through merchandise-plus-subscription rather than advertising.
- Competition for the same young audience forces entrants to invest in moderation and child-safety infrastructure as a baseline cost of operating, not an afterthought.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the industry consolidates around kid-safe walled gardens funded by physical-product tie-ins, while adult-oriented open worlds like Second Life cede the growth narrative entirely.
- A cohort raised on subscription virtual worlds before adolescence normalizes early online identity and spending habits, shaping what the next generation of consumers expects from social software.
The trend: Virtual-world investment is migrating from adult spaces toward children, where toy tie-ins and subscriptions — not advertiser enthusiasm — fund the growth.