Pokemon & Q, WSJ>
October 25, 1999
When Adults Crash Party,
Kids Grow Up at Net Speed
By THOMAS E. WEBER
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Fourteen-year-old Bomby Kitchpanich started his Web site to praise
Squirtle's powers and explain how to defeat Rhydon. "It started out real
small, with maybe one or two hits a week," recalls the ninth-grader at
Dimond High School in Anchorage, Alaska.
That was in February. Now, Bomby's Pokemon Center site brings in
several thousand visitors a day, runs paid ads from companies like
American Express and Qualcomm and has attracted a potential buyer. "I
never intended to make any money off it," he says. "But if you put in an
hour every day for eight months, you get something pretty big."
With the Pokemon craze in full swing and Internet mania as strong as ever,
good Web sites don't stay amateur for long, even when they're run by kids.
Young teens like Mr. Kitchpanich now routinely compete for visitors with
professionally run sites and fret over their standing in closely watched
rankings.
Billionaire Web executives brag about Internet
time, the dizzying speed at which technologies
evolve and innovators get rich. Judging by the
frenzied maneuverings of young Pokemon
Web masters, kids are being pulled into
Internet time, too, as their hobbies are swept
up in dot-com fever, complete with fierce
rivalries, tempting ad deals and grown-ups
seeking a piece of the action.
"I spend at least half an hour to an hour every
day, more on weekends," says Richard Cao, the 16-year-old proprietor of
the Psychic Pokemon Connection site, located at www.psypoke.com.
When I asked why, his answer echoed business presentations I've heard
countless times from CEOs twice his age: It's critical to add new material
to the site every day -- or frequent visitors to the site will be disappointed,
they won't drop by as often and traffic will drop.
The Pokemon Web sites -- and there are thousands of them -- offer chat
rooms, message boards and endless pages of trivia about the cute little
"pocket monsters" that are all over video games, trading cards and a TV
cartoon. But the staple offering is news. In recent days, Mr. Kitchpanich's
site, www.pokec.com, has covered everything from the release of a new
Pokemon game to a candy maker's deal to develop Poke Gum.
For a while the kids' Pokemon Web sites
were innocent hobbies. Then, earlier this year,
avaricious grown-ups descended on the scene.
Sites like Pokemon Village popped up. The
brainchild of Scott Smith, an adult who
operates a variety of Web sites for profit, it
ranks the top 2,000 Pokemon sites based on
how much traffic they draw. To qualify, a Pokemon site must display a
small "Pokemon Village Top Sites" badge. The emblem serves as a
tracking device for Mr. Smith's rankings, but it also links back to Mr.
Smith's site -- meaning that every site that displays the badge can
potentially drum up visitors for Mr. Smith.
The rankings soon brought out the worst in Pokemon Web masters.
Cheaters sought to fool the rankings by repeatedly viewing their own
pages. "It's turned into a real headache," Mr. Smith says. "I get e-mails all
day long saying this site's cheating, that site's cheating." He's counting on a
new, cheat-resistant system to woo back several prominent sites that had
defected in protest.
"The rankings changed things a lot," says Bill
Gill, the grown-up proprietor of Pojo.com,
one of the most popular sites. Mr. Gill, a
self-described "Mr. Mom," started his site late last year after seeing how
much his daughter loved Pokemon and quickly turned the site into a home
business. Once, Mr. Gill says, Web masters young and old shared
information, "but ever since the polls came out, it got competitive."
In addition to pitting the sites against one another, the ratings produced by
Mr. Smith and a few other sites also drew advertisers out of the
woodwork. Now they could see, at a glance, which sites were most
popular, and therefore most valuable.
It took one more development to fully commercialize sites like Bomby
Kitchpanich's. Not surprisingly, most companies are reluctant to sign
business deals with youngsters. So other sites stepped in as go-betweens.
These sites, typically bigger operations run by adults, entered arrangements
to "host" sites for kids. The host deals with the advertisers and inserts ads
into a kid's site. In exchange, the young Web master receives free Internet
service and, in some cases, a cut of the ad money.
Are kids up to the task of unraveling
complicated business agreements? I
spoke to one girl, age 14, who
operates a very popular site and
agreed to a hosting deal for half of
the ad revenue. When I asked her
about the details, she wasn't sure
how much money she could expect
or when she would get it.
The big companies whose ad spending fuels this system never even hear
about such deals. The U S West promotions running on the 14-year-old's
site were placed by Flycast, a Web-ad network that sells space on more
than 1,000 sites. Flycast, in turn, deals with the site host -- not the kids
producing the pages. A Flycast spokesman says the company wouldn't
necessarily know if a site was produced by a kid.
At least Bomby Kitchpanich is dealing directly
with the Internet start-up that wants to buy him
out. And the price he hopes to get would
cover a decent chunk of college tuition. His
father, Bancha Kitchpanich, owner of a Thai
restaurant in Anchorage, has brought in a
lawyer friend for advice. "I think it's a good opportunity for Bomby," Mr.
Kitchpanich says.
His son, meanwhile, is busy preparing for the next big thing to hit the
Pokemon world, the release of a feature film next month. "Mainly, I just
want to be a resource for anything related to Pokemon," he says. |
