KOL (AOL Kids Online)

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

~ the goodbye ~

kol was an aol secondary-brand that i would not have signed up for at any point in the relevant window. i was nineteen in '03 when the rebrand launched, the target demo was six to twelve year olds, that was about the cleanest age-out you can get from a product. the rebrand also happened inside the aol walled garden, which means it required an aol account and the aol 9.0 optimized client running on a windows machine that had an aol dial-up subscription attached to it, none of which a turkish ttnet adsl user would have had in '03 even if the age math had been different (close enough).

kol launched in september 2003 as a rebrand of the older kids only channel that aol had been running inside the service since the '90s. the rebrand was a clean visual reset, the new branding leaned into a kids-network feel rather than the parental-controls-aol-feature feel that the kids only channel had carried. the headline feature was radio kol, a live afternoon stream that ran weekdays from 3 to 7 pm eastern and was hosted by rick adams. peak listener count was above one million, which for the era was a real number for an internet-only radio show aimed at children.

the broadcast ended on 29 november 2007 and the archived stream of the older shows was kept up for another couple of months and then shut on 13 february 2008. for some reason the kol portal itself wound down across the same window. the kids only channel branding folded back into the broader aol parental-controls feature and the discrete kids portal as a brand stopped being maintained. that was the end of the four-year arc.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was ~

this part you had to be a kid in the us in '03 for, and i kind of was not. back then, the kol portal was a curated kid-safe walled garden inside the aol walled garden, the inner layer pre-screened sites and games and chat rooms against an age-appropriate filter that aol had been refining since the kids only channel days in the '90s. the radio kol show was the daily appointment piece, the part of the portal that gave it a daypart shape and that a kid would log in for at the same time every afternoon.

to be honest, the bigger frame around kol was the broader aol attempt in '03 and '04 to spin off discrete sub-brands that could be marketed independently of the dial-up subscription. aol latino launched in '03 in spanish with prepaid 7-eleven cards, aol music in the same window, kol fit into the same pattern as the kids version of the discrete sub-brand strategy. for some reason that strategy did not really work as the dial-up base shrank, the discrete sub-brands depended on the broader aol audience for distribution and that audience was leaving.

~ what remains ~

the kids-portal category that kol sat in was past by the late '00s in a more general way. the kids who would have been the kol audience in '03 were on neopets and webkinz and club penguin by '07, those platforms offered the kind of game-loop engagement that a curated portal-plus-radio-show could not match. the kids portal as a category ended somewhere across the '07-to-'09 window, the open web absorbed the kids audience into the broader virtual-pet and avatar-world platforms that came up in the same period.

the radio kol broadcast format itself is the artifact that the petition page on change.org keeps surfacing, with parents who remember the afternoon show from their own kids' rooms in '04 and '05 trying to get the format revived. for some reason that artifact is the part that has a small after-life, the rest of the portal wound down with the aol dial-up business that it sat inside.

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