Disney spends millions on Club Penguin Internet safety campaign for kids

Although it doesn’t feature the traditional Fab Five, Club Penguin is one of The Walt Disney Company’s wildly popular products. In fact, since Disney acquired the online game in 2007, it has grown to be one of the largest virtual worlds for children, with 175 million accounts worldwide, according to some sources. Because of its reach, Club Penguin is taking a leadership role in promoting and ensuring online safety for kids, its co-founder recently said.

For those who don’t have a child (or two) obsessed with Club Penguin like I do, allow me to introduce you to the puffles and their penguin owners who live on Club Penguin Island. First, Club Penguin offers two types of accounts — free and paid. Users who pay the monthly rate of $7.95 have more access and more options, of course. (If you buy time in blocks, there is a discount: $39.95 for six months and $59.95 for a year.) To hear my kids tell it, you HAVE to have a paid account to do the fun stuff, so that’s why they save their money to continue their memberships.

Club Penguin is like many other virtual worlds in that users play games to earn a currency to feather their nests and dress their players. In this case, penguins earn coins that they can use to purchase clothing for themselves, hats for their puffles and decorations for their igloos. Physical coins with online codes are attached to plush puffles and penguins and play sets sold in stores, and these unlock bonus items, such as extra puffles or clothes. The big Walt Disney World theme park gift shops and Once Upon a Toy at Downtown Disney carry the plush puffles, backpack clips and books. You can also find merchandise, including gift cards, at retailers such as Target and Toys R Us.

Club Penguin is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which means millions of users are playing at the same time. Penguins can friend each other, and if the requests are accepted, users gain access into each other’s igloos and can interact in other ways, such as messaging. This makes the game more interesting, but it is easy to see how it can open the door for abuse if proper controls are not in place.

“From the very start, our vision for Club Penguin was to create a safe place for my kids and their friends to play online. The scale may now be bigger than I could ever have imagined but that philosophy has not changed,” said Club Penguin co-founder Lane Merrifield and now executive vice president of Disney Online Studios in his recent keynote speech at the Children’s Media Conference, a U.K. industry meeting held earlier this month.

The urgency of ensuring a safe online playground has been brought to public attention again after moderators of a competing game, Habbo Hotel, have been accused in a British television report of allowing pedophiles to use the game to communicate with children. In response, Disney is spending $4.5 million on an Internet safety campaign with advertising on television, websites, magazines, and within Club Penguin and its other virtual worlds.

Safety aside, the game is designed for fun. And Club Penguin continues to introduce new content and ties to other Disney characters. Beginning July 19, penguins dressed as the lead characters from Disney Channel’s “Shake It Up” — Cece and Rocky — will host an Ultimate Jam music party on the virtual island. This parallels the current dance-off, Make Your Mark Ultimate Jam, being promoted on Disney Channel, in which the winner will appear on “Shake It Up.”

Merrifield also talked about the future of children’s media, saying: “As the boundaries of platforms are disappearing, and new methods of storytelling are emerging”¦ I believe that storytellers of the future will need to be able to think three-dimensionally about their characters and story arcs.

“If a child chooses to engage on a mobile device or through toys, their experience can be similar or different to a friend who chooses to use other platforms to engage with the story”¦ It becomes the ultimate choose-your-own-adventure.”