What’s going on with the Penguins?
August 1, 2007 The Walt Disney Company proudly announced that it had acquired “Club Penguin” an online virtual world targeting kids, which at that point already had won over700,000 paying subscribers since its launch only in October 2005 (see press release regarding the acquisition). The price tag: $-US 350 million plus another $-US 350 million if certain predefined earning targets would be met.
I had forgotten about that since I really fall not into the target audience of the site (age 6 to 14) … until I found an interesting overview of the development of social networking sites on Mashable. The interesting observation: while Club Penguin managed to increase the number of unique visitors in a comparison of February 2007 to February 2008 by 46% percent (quite good) it had to deal with an impressive reduction of the time each user spent on the side: down 80% (!) from 45:37 min to just 9:04 min. To me that is strange - and if correct shocking. Afterall in February 2007 Club Penguin did not yet have any Disney material to use nor could it use the creative minds of Disney, but by February 2008 it could use Disney content and make use of the creative minds of TWDC. So what did happen here? Anyone with a clue? Anyone who has subscribed to the site for his kids? We’d love to hear from you with a few comments or even a short report!