Online Community, Minus Smut: Whyville Aims to Make the Virtual Streets Safe for Kids
All it takes is a quick glance at ADOTAS’s “Most Popular” and “Most Commented” sections to see that the conversation regarding the major online social networks’ deficient safety standards and advertising’s relationship to this problem remains a serious, unsolved issue. Everyone seems to have an opinion about how MySpace should deal with all the controversy, but nobody is talking about alternatives. Has the endless MySpace hype really made us all so blind that we fail to even see other options anymore?
Well open your eyes people, because any advertisers looking to reach kids through a safe, brand-friendly marketing channel need look no further than a huge (though relatively unknown) virtual town called Whyville. A safe haven for kids online since its academia-based get-go, Whyville has also become, unbeknownst to most, one of the most heavily-trafficked sites on the entire Internet for the extremely hard-to-reach “tween” crowd — boys and girls ages 8-15.
Whyville currently has over 1.6 million registered users, and there are an average of 25,000+ unique boys and girls visiting the growing town daily. That’s a larger population of kids than any real city in the entire US can boast, and they have all found their way there without any of the hype surrounding services like MySpace or Facebook.
There are a whole suite of reasons to like Whyville from a marketing perspective (Scion’s interactive product placement that lets kids get in an xB and drive it around the virtual town is a good example), but now is the time to focus on safety. There’s a reason big brands continue to avoid sites like MySpace, and it has a lot to do with control. How can advertisers so concerned with controlling the message trust sites that have no control over their users? Whyville has been focusing on this idea of control and safety since its inception over 7 years ago.
First off, Whyville is very much an online location – a vibrant, immersive, nearly 3D town if you will – that its members virtually visit. But unlike MySpace, getting an idea about what is going on in the town at any one moment is a whole lot simpler than trying to gauge the latest craze on a few hundred million diverse personal sites, all of which are linked via a decidedly bogged-down server infrastructure.
While users of Whyville have access to a mail client within the service, the majority of communication within the community happens using that old internet standby, chat (in this case a kind of visual “avatar to avatar” chat), and as it turns out focusing on chat is a great way to monitor and police the communication that is going on within an online community.
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