KidZui, an ambitious “Walled Garden” of 600,000 approved websites for kids, has announced it will now begin offering much of its content for free, The Washington Post reports:
KidZui is a kid-safe browser made available in March for those willing to pay a monthly subscription fee ($5/mo to start and $10/mo thereafter). For whatever reason, KidZui has decided to abandon this group and join the wider web by offering its product for free – at least for most of its functionality. Premium memberships are now only necessary for users who want to access an extended set of features, such as extra tags for content and themes for decorating pages. On the parenting side of things, the paid features include more sophisticated activity reports and email updates. These memberships have been cut in half, so it only costs $5/mo or $50/yr.
I’ve always been a fan of “walled gardens” – protected portions of the web that restrict all but approved portions of the Internet for grade school and pre-school kids. The difficulty has always been building a workable business model around this great idea. Over the years, a number of these efforts have been tried and failed because they couldn’t make money. I’ve got reference material on several of these in my page on defunct filtering products, and they include EdView (ceased operations in 2000) and Internet Safari ( discontinued 2002). These companies can’t seem to get a critical mass of parents to pay for the service to make it profitable.
But I think KidZui may finally be on to something, by combing a walled garden with charging for premium content for other features. Club Penguin and WebKinz have shown that parents (like me – my kids love WebKinz) can be badgered into paying a subscription fee – if the content is compelling enough.
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