Webkinz = genius

A couple of months ago, a professor of mine was talking about his kids’ obsession with something called “Webkinz” and how he and all the other parents of kids his age in his town would rush to the store when word got out that a new batch of Webkinz had come in. At the time I didn’t think much of it, other than laughing at the thought of my professor having to burn over to the local mom & pop toy store to get his kids new plush toys.

This was my introduction to Webkinz, and the last time I thought about them until today when I was reading a post over at the Lightspeed Ventures blog about the recent ComScore numbers. According to ComScore, Webkinz.com gets the 28th most monthly visits per user on the web. After digging around on Webkinz.com a bit, I now see why this is the case. When you buy a Webkinz stuffed animal, you can then “adopt” the animal online via the Webkinz site. This creates a virtual world for your pet, complete with Happy, Health, and Hunger meters which decrease if you don’t exercise or feed your pet in “Webkinz World”…which obviously costs money. Imagine all the five year olds out there waking their parents up on Sunday morning telling them that Scruffy’s Hunger meter is low and that they need to buy him a cheeseburger in Webkinz World. Genius!

Webkinz is owned by the privately held Ganz company based in Toronto…