Jan 13, 2011

Here is the Home Page of our news site for kids 9 to 12: Kiddoki


As you know, we are working on the launch of our news site for kids: Kiddoki. We have been doing several designs of the home page for the 9-12 years old version. Here is the design we like.

Let's us know what you think about it.

We hope to be live in March. The site will be free for the basic edition. We will have a premium version. We are also looking at offering the site as a white label to create "junior news section" on local newspapers. If you are interested to talk about it shoot me an email.

In any case, teachers can already start to use our free classroom blog / site platform: neaclass. The platform will be linked to Kiddoki.

PS: The dinosaur image is used for design purpose only

4 comments:

  1. Sounds like an interesting business. Hopefully, your monetization will not require sponsorships and advertising in addition to the subscription.

    I think I'm your first follower @Kiddoki. Best of luck.

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  2. Humm! We are going to need some advertising and sponsorships. If you are a paid customer, you'll not see advertising. If you are a free customer, you will.
    Regarding sponsorships, it is part of our business models but for one section in particular: Topics. Brands will be able to sponsor a topic, like "Dinosaur" or they will able to have a mini-site around a topic, like: nutrition.
    We will not accept all brands (junk food or soda for example) and all topics.

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  3. Thanks @Jeff. My rationale around advertising, is more around adding unneeded distraction rather than brand indoctrination of children. I think a lot of advertising is meant to take someone away rather than add depth to the experience. I think your approach of sponsored content seems appropriate.

    I don't think you or I will be the one to stop Coke's message from reaching everyone on this planet :)

    Two other thoughts. Consider a tablet/iPad form factor early on as it is a much nicer experience for a parent and child to experience content together. I believe, and testing could prove that the same parents with iPads/tablets are in-market for e-learning tools and content for their kids. They're both curious and have the disposable income.

    Finally, I saw the prevalent Twitter/Facebook/RSS chicklets. It makes sense for parents but most email, bookmarking sites, RSS readers (non-browser), Twitter and Facebook all require you to be 13+ to register. You could have the parents subscribe on behalf of the kids to alert them of content, but the kids won't have access.

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  4. @Cyrus. Tx for the feedback. The tablet version (iPad/Android) is among the things that are in the pipeline.

    Regarding the functionality, some of them are for parents and teachers, not for kids. But we hope to have the three audiences, as our experience in Europe shows, and we need to buzz the content.

    One thing, we want to do is to allow anybody to embed our articles in his site, like you embed a you tube video. I'm going to write a post later on that.

    ReplyDelete