Google Popular Search Terms: Webkinz and Club Penguin

Posted by Pixelhead

Just checking out TechCrunches post Google Announces Fastest Growing Search Terms and fount the top ten popular search terms are:

1. iphone
2. webkinz
3. tmz
4. transformers
5. youtube
6. club penguin
7. myspace
8. heroes
9. facebook
10. anna nicole smith

I was looking at the comments and one person had no idea what Webkinz or club Penguin were. I have actually been working on a post about those two, which if you did not know, are two social sites for young kids(3-10), where kids can play online games and make online friends. Boy the Social sites are starting out young.

My daughter actually had a Club Penguin account and had managed to work her way up to a rather nicely equipped igloo when the 6 month membership her mother had bought her expired and her igloo vanished. Due to this occurrence, Club Penguin has left a rather bad taste in her mouth. She tells me she won’t bother with it ever again.

Club Penguin which was bought by Disney in August for $700 Million is a really fun site that starts out its users with free accounts that enable them to create penguin characters that can play all the games of the premium characters, but can not buy stuff for their characters without upgrading. After creating a Penguin character, penguins engage in playing games where by they receive coins that can be used to buy things for your character. Each Penguin comes with an igloo, but to upgrade the furnishings for it, the kids must get mom and dad to fork over $5.95 a month, $29.95 for six months or $57.95 a year. With over 700,000 paid members and well over 12 million activated accounts, that is certainly a lot of young eyeballs that Club Penguin and Disney have captured..I find it hard to believe that Anna Nicole is still in there.

Webkinz, is similar to Club Penguin in that it is a site with lots of games, and other Webkinz Screen Shot features including Webkinz email. A user starts out by purchasing a little stuffed toy animal, which has information attached to an character id card, such as an account number, name etc. Each toy enables the the kid to extend his account another 6 months. My daughter has many of these little creatures around the house, and has managed to get me on the Webkinz site more than once.

Ganz, which is the manufacturer of the toys, has a really popular money maker here. I was in Canada not too long ago, and when I was walking down the street in one of the Ontario towns, at least a half dozen shops had Webkinz merchandise for sale, which now includes clothing, dolls, trading cards and more. Quite a little racket. I can remember the first time I heard about Webkinz…now I wish I had never heard of them.lol
Webkinz Domination

Of the two sites, I believe that Webkinz will be the more popular of the two because they seem to have established Webkinz Galore themselves as both a dominant online presence and as an actual physical presence in stores. Webkinz has a great marketing technique were they are continuously rotating stock. Dolls that remain on shelves for too long are sent back to Ganz, and new ones are continuously being pumped out. This process of creating limited supplies of characters reminds me a lot of the Beanie Baby craze that was popular not too long ago.

Anyway, I thought I would let you know about Webkinz and Club Penguin, which happen to be two of the most popular search terms in case you were wondering. I maybe doing another post or two on these subjects, so don’t be surprised if you do.

How about you, do you have a favorite Webkinz animal. I kind of like the Panda.
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Written by Pixelhead on December 4th, 2007 with 32 comments.
Read more articles on Consumer Info and Marketing and Shopping and Uncategorized and Web 2.0

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32 comments

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Background Search
#1. December 4th, 2007, at 10:53 PM.

I wonder what the period of time was for those keywords’ data collection. I would think that stuff like ‘transformers’ and ‘anna nicole smith’ would have really died down now, since the Transformers movie and Anna Nicole Smith aren’t really plastered all over the media anymore. And the IPhone fever seems to have faded a bit too.

Dave
#2. December 4th, 2007, at 11:06 PM.

Webkinz and Club Penguin i have never heard before,till now thanks to you .That’s maybe i don’t have any kids yet but the real surprise to me is that myspace is still on the list, i thought it was already outdated.

Pixelhead
#3. December 5th, 2007, at 3:41 AM.

Background Search, I am not exactly sure about the time span. I don’t think they are the official top ten, but then again I could be wrong.
Dave- yea some of them do seem a bit old. I was actually wondering why Anna Nicole was on the list.

magic dude
#4. December 5th, 2007, at 8:39 AM.

I’ve never heard of them also. But first thing that comes to my mind, is it possible to get some traffic from the site?

It would be easy to create a website with a content that children enjoy. And if it’s possible to get traffic from WebKinz and Club Penguin, you’re on a good way to create awesome website.

Leonard
#5. December 5th, 2007, at 9:23 PM.

I have a 7 year old daughter and if you had one you’d know about Webkinz. It’s actually a very cool idea and looking at Google Trends (http://google.com/trends?q=webkinz) one can see how popular it is. “webkinz” has become more popular than “bush”, just for comparisan

Wi
#6. December 5th, 2007, at 9:53 PM.

I like the Cheeky Cat, but I think it was retired. I’m too old for Webkinz anyway

Jenny Wilde
#7. December 6th, 2007, at 11:48 AM.

Wow, thanks for this article. I must be really out of the loop, never heard anyone mention webkinz ever! Feel a bit more up to date now though!

Udo
#8. December 8th, 2007, at 12:47 AM.

The iphone, that was clear!
Thank for this great article! Very informative.

Todd Morris
#9. December 9th, 2007, at 7:41 AM.

Talk about timing … as I’m reading your post, my 10 year old daughter is over on the other other computer playing … you guessed, Webkinz. I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said about this company. In fact a couple of weeks ago I had a conversation with my 15 year old son (who is interested in entrepreneurship) about what a great job this company has done with their marketing strategy … especially the social aspect. I don’t know about you, but I can guarantee we’ll have more than a couple of those little stuffed animals under our tree on Christmas morning.

Pixelhead
#10. December 9th, 2007, at 2:26 PM.

There certainly can be a lot to be learned from studying the marketing model since it does seem to be such a successful merger of online and offline marketing.

BizDevMarketing
#11. December 10th, 2007, at 10:26 PM.

Hey all, first time commenter here. Just found this blog, Will be participating in discussion frequently.

To add to the discussion, I wonder what you all think about the possibility of SM sites for kids being inundated with soft sells and link building by SMMarketers. (I cant think of any online marketer whos agenda would fit with this.) Turning kids stuff into SEO back alleys = not nice. I actually hadn’t heard of these either.

While on the subject, here’s a list of 233 social networking sites segmented by genre. http://vandelaydesign.com/blog/social-media/list-social-networks/

UK HDTV
#12. December 11th, 2007, at 11:58 AM.

There are 5 out of 10 keywords in your list which I have ever heard them to be the top rated keywords. It is better to do a research and publish the list accordingly.

Pixelhead
#13. December 11th, 2007, at 2:11 PM.

Uk this was the list that was published on TechCrunc as told to them by a Google insider.

Everything Anything and Nothing
#14. December 11th, 2007, at 2:59 PM.

I am not a big fan of the Webkinz!

Get XBOX 360
#15. December 13th, 2007, at 12:18 AM.

club penguin… that’s such a cute name!!! never heard of it before

The Mommy Blogger
#16. December 13th, 2007, at 1:36 PM.

My kids just love the webkinz and they make for great gifts too!

Pixelhead
#17. December 13th, 2007, at 1:41 PM.

GetXbox360- interesting marketing method - I have not seen a WP theme used to sell a single product like this before. I’ll be interested to hear how your Christmas season went.

The Mommy Blogger- I am sure my daughter will get at least one Webkinz as a stocking stuffer. My fear is she will move onto more expensive things.

Scott Demaret
#18. December 13th, 2007, at 3:26 PM.

There is something interesting about this which I think quite a few of you have missed. Missing the point i think

Pixelhead
#19. December 13th, 2007, at 6:47 PM.

Please inform us Scott. I am sure there are all sorts of angels to the top rankings issue. Lots of new markets with each of these terms, even Anna Nichole.
Scott, sorry to have had to remove your url, but there is a commenting guideline that does not allow links to comments without a blog in order to prevent spam comments. If you have a blog you would like your link to aim to please let me know.

From the looks of your site, Paintworksstudio’s seems to have some groovy website designs.

3D Printers
#20. December 14th, 2007, at 4:03 PM.

Did you see the losers? They show what not to blog about:
world cup, mozart, fifa, rebelde, kazaa, xanga, webdetente, sudoku, shakira, and mp3. The original source of the list is from Google Zeitgeist.

I have a 9 year old daughter. I live in a Webkinz universe. I can handle this. I’m just praying that teenage fads during the next decade won’t be lethal.

Pixelhead
#21. December 14th, 2007, at 4:46 PM.

I hear ya 3D…who knows what kids will be into in the future. Wish I did, I would be a zillionaire.

JC
#22. December 15th, 2007, at 1:15 PM.

Most of these sites have the advantage of being unheard of the prior year having just launched. It’s an interesting list though to examine changes in popular culture.

Web Design RI
#23. December 18th, 2007, at 4:48 AM.

Don’t forget about Leroy Jenkins.

Custom Lapel Pins
#24. February 16th, 2008, at 7:54 PM.

If you could just have a crystal ball into the minds of children…. We would all be millionaires!

Pixelhead
#25. February 18th, 2008, at 6:11 PM.

Isnt that the truth…Custom Lapel Pins, you should start one of these sites too. Kids could collect pins and get a subscription with each pin they buy. Boys as well as girls possibly would do this…just a thought…Oh love your blog.

Web Plush
#26. April 3rd, 2008, at 9:40 PM.

Something else to keep the kids in front of the computer and not reading a book or playing in the sun with their friends. Oh well, if you cant beat-um, join-um.

Cayman Island Activites
#27. April 4th, 2008, at 6:36 AM.

I can understand the search term iPhone, but I didn’t know kids were that into webkinz..and why don’t people know how to enter youtube.com into their web browser??

Peter
#28. May 4th, 2008, at 5:41 AM.

I love webkinz so much. it good news.

Webkinz
#29. July 26th, 2008, at 5:15 AM.

Back around Christmas all my kids talked about were Webkinz Webkinz Webkinz. I have to say, I got sick of hearing it over and over. However, it got my brain turning and sure enough after asking around I found out these things were so friggin popular.

So instead of complaining, i did some research and got my webkinz blog up and running. I thank my kids for helping me discover a new and profitable niche.

Terry
#30. August 4th, 2008, at 10:25 AM.

Geez! The networking sites for kids. I did nt know anything like that. They are definitely starting young. This will grow up into their personality.

high roller
#31. October 14th, 2008, at 12:43 PM.

I have actually been working on a post about those two, which if you did not know, are two social sites for young kids(3-10), where kids can play online games and make online friends. Boy the Social sites are starting out young.

Beztar
#32. October 20th, 2008, at 3:46 PM.

Club Penguin and Webkinz are both very popular sites still. I have a Club Penguin Secrets blog about Club Penguin and Dizzywood which is another game that is a lot of fun to play. Some of the other Club Penguin blogs have millions of hits so they’re very popular I think.

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