Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play - New York Times
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Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Presleigh Montemayor, 9, likes the Cartoon Doll Emporium.
By MATT RICHTEL and BRAD STONE
Published: June 6, 2007
E-MAIL
Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and
spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the
Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But
the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who
is 9 years old, prefers a Web site called Cartoon Doll
Emporium.
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1 . Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and
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The site lets her chat with her
friends and dress up virtual dolls, by placing
blouses, hair styles and accessories on them. It
beats playing with regular Barbies, said Presleigh,
who lives near Dallas.
“With Barbie, if you want clothes, it costs money,”
she said. “You can do it on the Internet for free.”
Presleigh is part of a booming phenomenon, the
growth of a new wave of interactive play sites for a
young generation of Internet users, in particular
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Page 1 of 5
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play - New York Times
young generation of Internet users, in particular
girls.
Dress up dolls include Beyoncé
Knowles, from Stardoll, and
Rudolph Giuliani, from Cartoon
Doll Emporium.
Enlarge This Image
Brian Harkin for The New York Times
Players at Stardoll.com can buy
credits over their cellphones
and use them to buy more
clothes for dolls like the actor
Will Smith.
Millions of children and adolescents are spending
hours on these sites, which offer virtual versions of
traditional play activities and cute animated worlds
that encourage self-expression and safe
communication. They are, in effect, like Facebook
or MySpace with training wheels, aimed at an
audience that may be getting its first exposure to
the Web.
While some of the sites charge subscription fees,
others are supported by advertising. As is the case
with children’s television, some critics wonder about
the broader social cost of exposing children to
marketing messages, and the amount of time spent
on the sites makes some child advocates nervous.
Regardless, the sites are growing in number and
popularity, and they are doing so thanks to the word
of mouth of babes, said Josh Bernoff, a social media and marketing industry
analyst with Forrester Research.
06/07/2007 09:59 AM
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“They’re spreading rapidly among kids,” Mr. Bernoff said, noting that the
enthusiasm has a viral analogy. “It’s like catching a runny nose that everyone in
the classroom gets.”
Hitwise, a traffic measurement firm, says visits to a group of seven virtualworld sites aimed at children and teenagers grew 68 percent in the year ended
April 28. Visits to the sites surge during summer vacation and other times
when school is out. Gartner Research estimates that virtual-world sites have
attracted 20 million users, with those aimed at younger people growing
especially quickly.
Even as the children are having fun, the adults running the sites are engaged in
a cutthroat competition to be the destination of choice for a generation of
Americans who are growing up on computers from Day 1.
These sites, with names like Club Penguin, Cyworld, Habbo Hotel, Webkinz,
WeeWorld and Stardoll, run the gamut from simple interactive games and chat
to fantasy lands with mountains and caves.
When Evan Bailyn, chief executive of Cartoon Doll Emporium, said that when
he created the site, “I thought it would be a fun, whimsical thing.” Now, he
says, “it’s turned into such a competitive thing,” adding that “people think they
are going to make a killing.”
Even Barbie herself is getting into the online act. Mattel is introducing
BarbieGirls.com, another dress-up site with chat features.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/technology/06doll.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=d5f30612d687036a&ex=1181361600&pagewanted=all
Page 2 of 5
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play - New York Times
06/07/2007 09:59 AM
BarbieGirls.com, another dress-up site with chat features.
In recent months, with the traffic for these sites growing into the tens of
millions of visitors, the entrepreneurs behind them have started to refine their
business models.
Cartoon Doll Emporium, which draws three million visitors a month, is free for
many activities but now charges $8 a month for access to more dolls to dress
up and other premium services. WeeWorld, a site aimed at letting 13- to-25year-olds dress up and chat through animated characters, recently signed a
deal to permit the online characters to carry bags of Skittles candy, and it is
considering other advertisers.
On Stardoll, which has some advertising, users can augment the wardrobe they
use to dress up their virtual dolls by buying credits over their cellphones. At
Club Penguin, a virtual world with more than four million visitors a month, a
$5.95-a-month subscription lets users adopt more pets for their penguin
avatars (animated representations of users), which can roam, chat and play
games like ice fishing and team hockey.
Lane Merrifield, chief executive of Club Penguin, which is based in Kelowna,
British Columbia, said that he decided on a subscription fee because he
believed advertising to young people was a dangerous proposition. Clicking on
ads, he said, could bring children out into the broader Web, where they could
run into offensive material.
Mr. Merrifield also bristles at any comparison to MySpace, which he said is a
wide-open environment and one that poses all kinds of possible threats to
young people.
To make Club Penguin safe for children, the site uses a powerful filter that
limits the kinds of messages users can type to one another. It is not possible,
Mr. Merrifield said, to slip in a phone number or geographic location, or to use
phrases or words that would be explicit or suggestive. Other sites are also set
up to minimize the threat of troublesome interactions or limit what users can
say to one another.
“We’re the antithesis of MySpace,” Mr. Merrifield said. “MySpace is about
sharing information. We’re all about not being able to share information.”
Other sites are more open, like WeeWorld, which permits people to create
avatars, dress them up and then collect groups of friends who type short
messages to one another. The characters tend to be cute and cartoonish, as do
the home pages where they reside, but the chatter is typical teenager.
“There’s a lot of teasing and flirting,” said Lauren Bigelow, general manager of
WeeWorld. She said that the site had around 900,000 users in April and is
growing around 20 percent a month.
Ms. Bigelow said that 60 percent of WeeWorld users are girls and young
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/06/technology/06doll.html?ei=5087%0A&em=&en=d5f30612d687036a&ex=1181361600&pagewanted=all
Page 3 of 5
Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play - New York Times
06/07/2007 09:59 AM
women, a proportion that is higher on some other sites. Stardoll said that its
users are 93 percent female, typically ages 7 to 17, while Cartoon Doll
Emporium said that it is 96 percent female, ages 8 to 14.
Some of the companies are aiming even younger. The Ontario company Ganz
has a hit with Webkinz, plush toys that are sold in regular stores and are aimed
at children as young as 6. Buyers enter secret codes from their toy’s tag at
webkinz.com and control a virtual replica of their animal in games. They also
earn KinzCash that they can spend to design its home. The site draws more
than 3.8 million visitors a month.
Sherry Turkle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who
studies the social aspects of technology, said that the participants on these sites
are slipping into virtual worlds more easily than their parents or older siblings.
“For young people, there is rather a kind of fluid boundary between the real
and virtual world, and they can easily pass through it,” she said.
For some children, the allure of these sites is the chance to participate and
guide the action on screen, something that is not possible with movies and
television.
“The ability to express themselves is really appealing to the millennial
generation,” said Michael Streefland, the manager of Cyworld, a virtual world
that started in South Korea and now attracts a million users a month in the
United States, according to comScore, a research firm. “This audience wants to
be on stage. They want to have a say in the script.”
But Professor Turkle expressed concern about some of the sites. She said that
their commercial efforts, particularly the advertising aimed at children, could
be crass. And she said that she advocates an old-fashioned alternative to the
sites.
“If you’re lucky enough to have a kid next door,” she said, “I’d have a play date
instead of letting your kid sit at the computer.”
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Doll Web Sites Drive Girls to Stay Home and Play - New York Times
06/07/2007 09:59 AM
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