Busy Disney

As connected kids hunker down to tinkering with the computers, PlayStations, Nintendos, XBoxes, mobile phones and other Internet-friendly devices that they got for Christmas this year, the granddaddy of mass-media content for children, Disney, is gearing up for a relaunch of its web site.

According to this article from the Wall Street Journal, Disney has been caught out by how other online properties offering things like chatrooms, blogs and other social networking features have stolen a march on it when it comes to capturing young audiences online. This is a huge problem for Disney, since increasingly the Internet is the medium of choice for targeting children as consumers.

Rather than trying to buy a kids-focussed version of YouTube/Myspace/Digg like Club Penguin, Robert Iger, the CEO of Disney, says he is trying to tweak what Disney already has to make it more like what others already offer: it's creating a place for kids to communicate with each other, namely about Disney-related things, while partaking in different bits of Disneyana such as music, cartoons and games based on Disney characters.

One big catch however seems to be that initially the company will not allow users to post non-Disney material. As one television executive said to me recently, kids don't care where they get their content--the TV is no longer the magnet it once was. I would say that the same lack of territoriality probably also exists for media brands. Kids don't care who owns the rights to Donald Duck and Daffy Duck, but when they can't import Daffy onto their new Disney page, they might just move to another place altogether.