Webkinz - A Great Example of Web 2.0 Supporting Product Sales
I just saw Webkinz a Ganz Website uploaded to docstoc (presentation embeded below), and I started looking into Webkinz. Who knew it was one of the most trafficked sites on the web (Alexa Ranking.)
The site’s traffic increased from around 300K unique visitors in 2006 to likely over 5M uniques/month today. I haven’t yet joined the site (I have to draw the line somewhere), but it looks like a Second Life for Kids where they raise, feed, clothe and play with virtual pets while chatting with their friends.
The really interesting part is that this community was likely not started by a bunch of teen geeks in silicon valley, but rather by its corporate parent Ganz, they promote themselves as “from lovable animals to decorative accessories GANZ offers you the best gifts in the world”
So the really interesting part of this web company seems to be the real business behind it. Ganz is partially in the business of selling these cute little toys. My guess is that the Webkinz site is a huge driver of products for Ganz.
There are countless examples of entrepreneurs starting web communities and subsequently looking for products/services to sell. There aren’t as many examples of it working well in the reverse (or the latter for that matter). It looks like Ganz has hit on something here, and may very well be a great case model for other companies to follow
Here are more stats about Webkinz and Ganz
Webkinz a Ganz Website - Get more Creative Writing
July 6th, 2008 at 3:21 pm
Good find — any reason why you can go past page 7, though?
Cheers
tony @ dji
July 6th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Tony there are only 7 slides in the presentaiton
July 8th, 2008 at 2:09 pm
Nice post Jason. I can’t believe you didn’t know about Webkinz though (maybe I spend too much time around my little cousins).
Firstly, the post refers to Webkinz as a “web company” but it isn’t. It is a traditional company, like Mattel, that has leveraged the web to extended its brand and interact with its customers.
Disney has done the same thing with countless properties, especially Pirates of the Caribbean ( see http://apps.pirates.go.com/pirates/v3/welcome).
I wouldn’t call this a “new” model at all, it just doesn’t get much publicity amongst web 2.0 geeks (business models seem to be consistently overlooked).
Leveraging a brand and customer relationships via new channels is simple business sense and has been done for years.
As for doing it in the reverse, I would say that Sophie’s Philosophies has done exactly that - build the site and then leverage that for offline products, and that was written about in BusinessWeek back in 2005. (see http://www.sophiesphilosophies.com/)