KidsCom

» see kidscom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

In February 1995 I was ten years old in Turkey and three years away from owning a modem. KidsCom went live that month for American children aged eight to fourteen, a bracket I fit exactly and a country I did not. By the time I got online at all the site had already been through a federal investigation and come out the other side.

It was published by Circle 1 Network, LLC out of Milwaukee, and for a 1995 launch it was unusually complete. There was moderated chat and a pen-pal system for finding other kids by country. There was also a points currency called KidsKash, which children earned by answering questions and spent on things inside the site. The archived homepages from the late nineties are a wall of hand-drawn GIF buttons with names like Kids Talk and Around the World, each one leading into a separate small feature.

Almost nothing aimed at children existed on the web when it launched, which gave KidsCom a run at the category several years before Disney or Nickelodeon took it seriously. It survived the dot-com collapse and then the shift onto Flash and back off it again, and was still publishing when it stopped. Twenty-four years is longer than almost any children's site of that generation managed.

The end was administrative. Circle 1 Network stopped renewing kidscom.com in 2019 and the site went with it. The last capture in the Internet Archive is 27 June 2019, a normal working page of about five kilobytes, and after that there is nothing at all for the domain or any path under it. No farewell post and no notice to the members.

~ the case file ~

~ the regulator got there first ~

The Center for Media Education asked the Federal Trade Commission to look at KidsCom, and in July 1997 the FTC staff answered with a letter that set out, for the first time in public, what the agency thought the rules should be for collecting personal information from children online. KidsCom was the specific case the principles were written against.

The problem was the KidsKash Question. Children were told that answering it would earn them premiums, and were not told that the answers had marketing uses; the data then went to other companies in anonymous aggregate form. Staff concluded that the disclosure was likely inadequate and likely misleading, and then declined to take any punitive action, because by the time they reached that conclusion KidsCom had changed its practices and cooperated throughout. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act passed the following year.

So the first kids-only site large enough to be worth investigating became the worked example the law was drafted against, and paid nothing for it. It then went on operating for another twenty-two years.

~ the 2007 rebuild ~

Circle 1 raised new capital in 2006 and spent it on rebuilding KidsCom as a virtual world, which launched in 2007 into the peak of that market, alongside Club Penguin and Webkinz and a dozen others. It worked better than the timing suggests. The world gathered more than two million users and gave the site a second decade it would not otherwise have had.

The content angle by then was environmental. Much of the later KidsCom was built around teaching children about climate change through games, which is a long way from the pen-pal board of 1995 and probably the reason the site kept getting written up in education roundups well into the 2010s.

~ nobody said anything ~

Sites this old usually die loudly. There is a post, or a countdown, or at minimum a static page left behind by someone who worked there. KidsCom got none of that, and the archive record shows why: a site that was operating normally in late June 2019 and then simply was not resolvable, which is what an expired registration looks like from the outside.

Whatever the members had made on it, the accounts and the KidsKash balances, went at the same moment as the DNS record. A generation of American kids learned the shape of an online community on that site and there is no exit interview from anybody who ran it.

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