{"id":1312,"date":"2007-05-17T14:30:16","date_gmt":"2007-05-17T18:30:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/17\/clubpenguin-thats-a-lot-of-herring\/"},"modified":"2007-05-17T14:30:16","modified_gmt":"2007-05-17T18:30:16","slug":"clubpenguin-thats-a-lot-of-herring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2007\/05\/17\/clubpenguin-thats-a-lot-of-herring\/","title":{"rendered":"ClubPenguin: That’s a lot of herring"},"content":{"rendered":"

snipshot_e4ufvcdnb3u.jpgI didn’t get a chance to write about this yesterday when it broke, but I think it’s pretty amazing (if true) that ClubPenguin is talking with Sony about getting acquired for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500-million or so (TechCrunch says $500-million<\/a>, but PaidContent says that the price is closer to $450-million<\/a>). Om Malik has some details here<\/a>. Either way, those are pretty amazing sums of money for a company that has only really been around for a year or so. As my Globe and Mail colleague Barrie McKenna wrote in a story last fall<\/a>, the company was started by a couple of guys in the relatively sleepy (at least when I was there last) resort town of Kelowna, B.C. <\/p>\n

Parents with kids, the founders deliberately chose not to include advertising on the site, and in fact haven’t advertised the site either — growth has been entirely through word-of-mouth. Judging by the speed with which it spread through my family, from eight-year-old daughter to friends and cousins, it is the childhood equivalent of Facebook (as is its cousin Webkinz, also a Canadian success story<\/a> aimed at kids, which Om says Disney has looked at). <\/p>\n

Two big questions remain: Can ClubPenguin keep growing at a rate fast enough that it makes $500-million look like a good deal? And can the company find a partner that has the same philosophy about marketing to kids?<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I didn’t get a chance to write about this yesterday when it broke, but I think it’s pretty amazing (if true) that ClubPenguin is talking with Sony about getting acquired for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500-million or so (TechCrunch says $500-million, but PaidContent says that the price is closer to $450-million). Om Malik has … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “ClubPenguin: That’s a lot of herring”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1312"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1312\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}