By \ October 19, 2006
What? Seriously, “The Kids’ Market in the U.S.,” a study by market research firm, Packaged Facts, concluded that kids between 3 and 11 years old had a total of $18 billion dollars of spending power in 2005 – and growing… they say the number will reach $21.4 billion by 2010.
As kiddies gain more consumer power (read Porter’s “Five Forces”), they will be able to collectively (and probably unknowingly) negotiate better prices.
There are websites springing up all over the place designed to pocket some of this cash. The most interesting ones are the social networking sites for kids.
Sites such as ClubPenguin.com, NeoPets.com , and imbee are all jockeying to capture their share of the action.
As you would imagine, parents are concerned about the hazards of web. Privacy, sexual predators, social development, carpal tunnel, and lack of physical exercise are the things have parents bugging out the most. And since kids in this age group still listen to their parents, these social networking sites face some significant hurdles.
Many of these sites have instituted some sort of “parental permission” mechanism – but none of them (as far as I can tell) have offered what parents really want: a time limit. If one of these sites had compelling content and activities, account activation that is strictly created and controlled by a parent, and an option for a parent to specify the length of time the kid can use the site each day, then I’d bet parents would be more inclined to allow their kids to “play.” As it stands now, parents are “forced” to be the “bad guy” by policing the time their kids spend behind the computer. Under this scenario, kiddy social networking sites would sacrifice session length for increase subscriptions. Not to mention support-equity from parents.
Take a look at the activity around Facebook, MySpace and other social networking sites… they are advertising gold mines. If they knew what was good for them, they would invest some cash and develop some vertical stratification.
In the meantime, we, the designers of communicators – the marketers, need to start thinking about what methods we will use to capture the attention of this demography on the web.