It’s official. Acquisition season in the children’s social networking world has begun. Moments ago, Disney acquired the wildly successful children’s social networking site Club Penguin for $350 million dollars. Club Penguin launched its unique online service for children in October 2005, just six months after another wildly successful social networking website for children, Webkinz. This past June, Club Penguin reached 4.7 million unique visitors to it site according to comScore Media Metrix.
While the folks at Club Penguin have recently been in discussion with Sony regarding the sale of the company, negotiations broke down just a few short weeks ago with the technology giant.
There has been a buzz of activity related to social networking in the last year and we’ve yet to hear the end of it. What’s noteworthy about this particular deal? Here are a few of my predictions:
- This is the first major acquisition in the children’s social networking space. Plan to see similar acquisitions soon.
- Many more social networking site for kids have launched in the last two months, with many more yet to be announced.
- So much activity is occurring in the kids’ social networking environment, that this specific online activity for children is positioned to become very crowded over the next six months.
Stay tuned for lots more activity and news in this space! (For related blog articles, see my posts in April and May of 2007.)
