club penguin

After reading the CNN article, I decided to research Club Penguin. I had heard of Club Penguin before because I am fairly certain my younger cousins belong, but I never knew the details or scope of the community. From basic research, I found that Club Penguin is a virtual world aimed mainly at children ages 6-14, with a very strong commitment to providing safe web play and interaction to its young users. In Club Penguin, players use cartoon penguins as their avatars to engage in a variety of activities and "waddle around" in a winter wonderland. The following is the closest I could get to a mission statement from the Club Penguin Corporate website: "In March 2005, the founders of Club Penguin set out to create an ad-free, virtual world where children could play games, have fun and interact. As Internet specialists and parents, they wanted Club Penguin to be a place they'd feel comfortable letting their own children and grandchildren visit."


Club Penguin offers two membership options: free and paid. Free members can play, explore, and chat, but a good portion of the features that appeal to children, like customizing their igloo, are unavailable. Paid members have access to all features of the community. 
Membership Rates are as follows:
        $7.95/month 
        $39.95/ 6 months
        $59.95/ 1 year
Club Penguin also has an online store to sell physical merchandise relevant to Club Penguin to its users. Club Penguin uses the funds from their paid memberships and product sales to finance their operating costs (moderating, serving, and omitting third party advertising). The latest statistic I found regarding Club Penguin's membership was from 2008: 12 million members, 700,000 of them paid subscribers.  Initially I was surprised that they were willing to operate with only around 6% of users paying for the community, but in reading more about the company, I discovered that the aim is more so to reach as many as possible. Nicole Thompson (executive producer of Club Penguin) stressed, “A community is not a customer. They are customers but we can’t keep that in mind. [If we do] it will muddy the waters and probably… lead to bad choices.” With that being said, I think it is interesting to note that paid vs. free memberships have established a sort of exclusivity and hierarchy; some free users feel pressured to get paid memberships (or beg their parents for them rather) because their friends have them, and they feel left out. So essentially, Club Penguin is allowing social pressures to handle their promotions for paid memberships.


The success of this company caught the attention of Disney, who bought the company in 2008 for $350 million+ and have continued to catapult the community into the premiere  web community for children that parents fully approve of.