If you felt a little green with envy when Disney bought juvenile virtual world Club Penguin for $700 million in cash and earn out, this could be your chance to grab a piece of the virtual pie.
WhuddleWorld, Inc., creator of eponymous online hangout for kids WhuddleWorld, was forced to shut down in April after running out of money. The team of five that built WhuddleWorld over the last year and a half is soliciting acquisition and partnership offers to get the immersive world back online.
Co-founder Dee Hardrath claims that at the time of shutdown WhuddleWorld had grown to 76,000 registered members and a monthly page view count of 20M. She also says the company still receives emails four months later from loyal followers pleading them to get the world back into operation.
Interested in investing? Drop them a line. Perhaps you will be the one to pull them out of the TechCrunch DeadPool.
Check out our recent roundup of virtual worlds for information about the competitors in this space.
Update: Additional materials regarding the WhuddleWorld business plan and its pre-shutdown traffic have been posted below in comment #21.
Well, they have an interesting set of demographics:
Male
What do these kids do online? Wouldn’t parents want them to go outside and play. Looks like a MySpace for kids.
Any idea of how much it would take to get it back up and running again?
#3 – Bill: Not sure, but the company claims that they needed less than 300k to get to the point they were at in April.
You know who needs an acquisition like this — TY Beanie Babies; if this thing could morph into like a WebKinz.
They shut down for a reason.
#6 – TechDumpster: True, although the existence of a reason doesn’t necessarily mean this isn’t a good acquisition target.
The reason they shut down seems to be that they had a poor revenue model. They didn’t charge for memberships or run any advertisements, but only sold very cheap virtual items for display on user profiles. Contrast this with what Club Penguin does to raise most of its money (the sale of paid memberships) and the prospect of turning WhuddleWorld around doesn’t seem unreasonable.
The site barely gets 20K uniques monthly, and it has dropped off to 5K. Maybe the infrastructure is worth something.
Miss Teen USA 2007 – South Carolina on news?
geeze, Does anyone here believe Virtual world is USA?
@6 I agree, may have to keep them in the Deadpool. Marketing wise, that’s an awful name. I’ve never heard my kids, their cousins or friends go crazy over that site. All they care about is Club Penguin or Web Kinz.
I thought the article says they get 20 million page views a month.?
The question here is 1) how many users would switch to a paid model like Club Penguin and/or 2) how high of a CPM could you get from directly selling to advertisers in this market?
It doesn’t look all bad…
Hopefully someone can save this whiddle whuddles.
couldn’t they switch the backend to Amazon web services and then save a bunch on bandwidth and server bills? I suspect that its flash frontend and java backend so should be easy to get it up and running on aws.
20 million page hits a month is definitely false. The owners are putting out false information. Mark Hendrickson needs to do better research before putting such numbers. A quick look at alexa and compete.com would tell you how low their numbers are. You can’t make a 1-1 relationship between page hits and an alexa rank/graph, but you can certainly rule out a few things.
#14 – Raghu: In my defense, I didn’t say they currently have that many page views per month, which you seem to be implying. That’s merely the number the company claims to have had when the service was shut down. I’m looking into the data to see if there is any verifiable truth to that claim and will report back.
Alexa and Compete certainly don’t corroborate the company’s claim, but those services are notoriously bad at measuring niche audiences. Comscore won’t provide any data because there are too few users currently going to the site.
This doesn’t mean that the site did in fact have 20M page views in April, but I don’t think we can rule the possibility out yet. I have sent Dee a message and hopefully she will get back to us to explain how she came up with that number.
Darren, amazon hosting does NOT save that much when you have users that return which requires massive amounts of data access, unless you are generating reasonable returns per user the cost is equally as prohibitive as most hosting solutions (when you consider data transfer cost, backup, server time).
What amazon does save you is staffing costs for maintaining your own infrastructure. It allows you to scale fast should you achieve any instant success.
Gostaria de ter essa comunidade…
Mark,
Since Whuddle doesn’t seem to be listed as part of your previous roundup, do you know what type of functionality and features these guys offered before they dove into the deadpool?
Was the site a Penguin clone, or were they offering anything worthwhile that couldn’t be built quickly by another dev team?
How this company could take investment from the outset without any intention of integrating the common revenue model (micro-payments for credits/membership) seen in any successful browser-based MMO is simply baffling.
Micro-payments being so rapidly adopted by consumers within the browser-based multi-user gaming market is what makes this such a financially lucrative market and thus what makes it so attractive to investors. According to an article from Milwaukee’s ‘The Business Journal’ WhuddleWorld has taken at least 300k investment so far.
I can only assume they’re in the dead pool because they can’t afford to host the service any more – may be some of this funding should have been put toward a self-maintaining revenue model perhaps?
Apparently ‘dodgy’ site stats aside, what it really comes down to is the lack of sensible business direction that makes this totally uninvestible from a partnership perspective. The businesses best bet would be acquisition, but unlike the ‘youtube’s’ of the 2.0 boom these games success depends on a certain amount of creative and artistic flair from the founders.
Whether it’s possible to find an investor would really feel confident acquiring and attempting to turn around a business that relies heavily on another individuals conceptualisation amd intellectual property is what remains to be seen.
Co-founder Dee Hardrath got back to me with a business overview (PDF) and a graph showing their traffic through April. These materials should help clarify where they got 20M page views per month figure, and what helps to differentiate their service from others in the market.
She also included this disclaimer about the traffic stats:
“NOTE: There is a great disparity in hit counts and page views that occurs in
October 2006, this is due to our system administrator re-writing the way webalizer tracked our stats to be a more accurate. Because most of our site was served up inside I-Frames and CSS div overlays, a good deal of the raw hits we received prior to October 2006 were exponentially higher than they should have been. Hence the reconfigure of Webalizer (and the huge dip in stats at that point), so the picture of hits and growth in those from October 2006 – April 2007 is pretty on par and accurate.”
Also, I should note that contrary to commentator #1’s observation, almost all of their users are (were?) actually female. And most of them hailed from the United States.
Mark – good point but I don’t think there’s much to acquire here. The “investment” they are looking for is greater than the value of the assets themselves. Any major company looking to enter a new business always faces a Build vs. Buy decision. While the “buy” is cheap here, it still doesn’t have a lot of value because these kinds of assets are a dime a dozen.
Most Web 2.0 coders don’t realize that most sites have boring, unimpressive code that isn’t particularly innovative. Execution is far more important and clearly, this virtual world has failed to get anywhere.
#23 – TechDumpster: I’d say that’s a fair assessment. The co-founder I keep mentioning, Dee, has suggested that she might put up a demo of the site for potential investors to see. If that happens, we might be able to get a better sense of whether the company’s assets have much value.
@#20 Elliot – Actually I don’t disagree with your assessment entirely. Of course, I am somewhat biased, given that I’m the idea-gal who came up with the concept of WhuddleWorld. However, let me add a couple comments in response:
We did indeed offer a micro payment system (though it was in early infancy at the time the site shut down) and it was a large portion of our planned revenue model. It fact it was the single piece projected to eventually become our operating cost “coverage” and then some, with brand advertising and merchandising following closely on its heels.
However, your final summary I think is on par. Whomever picks up WhuddleWorld – if anyone – is going to do so because they see merit in the conceptualization used to create the property more than anything. We just weren’t “alive” long enough to have an opportunity to PROVE solid risk resolutions or prove our revenue models. Remember, we were forced to come offline while we were still putting the finishing touches on our development. So yes, still a risk – but if you could see the user response and feedback we received, I’d say it’s really no risk at all.
@23 TechDumpster – Sometimes it isn’t the technology that’s the focus. Of course, scalability related to, idealistically, exponential spurts of growth is critical. But not everything is broken down to innovation or “bleeding edge technology”. It’s also not always necessary to reinvent the wheel. I’d guess the sites like Neopets and Gaia Online don’t ring in very high on the Web 2.0 measurement of yawn vs. excitement either.
Sometimes its about the heart…and how that resonates with consumers. And there definitely is a great deal of “heart energy” that went into the creation of this property, and that in turn was picked up and carried forward by our users. Check out the still existing fandom, the ongoing barrage of emails we continue to receive requesting we “find a way” to bring the site back up and the numerous remaining links back to the now dormant property.
You may “pooh pooh” that type of “sentimentalism” as pure business idiocy – but I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss it. We’ve got something special embued in our “whiddle whuddles (see @12)” and it definitely resonates.
i hope you guys sell … seems like a perfect opportunity for someone with deep pockets to buy low, grow and sell high.
I’m sick of hearing about startups that took only “300k” or “150k” to launch – the people involved fail to place any value whatsoever on their own time, not to mention opportunity costs.
Noted Dee, well I wish you the best for the future in getting what you seek for WhuddleWorld whether it be partnership, an acquistion deal or simply funding to continue the project.
-@#23 – Mark, representing a company that holds an attractive investment opportunity for a browser-based MMO myself, is this something I can contact you about for possible exposure on Techcrunch?
I’ve been familiar with this site from the beginning (with a bit of inside perspective), so I’ll throw in my two cents. I think the site suffered from two main problems; unscalable/expensive hosting and underfunding. Both are definitely fixable.
I agree with Darren that the site should be hosted on AWS for less expensive hosting and greater scalability. Any potential acquirer should first port the whole shebang to AWS, settle on micropayments vs. membership, then spend all resources on growth and get that 78k member into the millions.
I spent time testing out the site and their execution, particularly the art direction, was top-notch. There’s a reason they still have members asking them when they’ll be back up. I think this is an excellent buy for any children’s brand that wants to expand their presence online.
It’s interesting idea.
As an on-again off-again former member of the WW team, I’m heartened to see at least a flicker of support for what could really be the next Second Life for the younger set, and us “old folk” too. When I came across this post, my insides got all twisted up, yet again, with hope that SOMETHING might happen to turn this around. From my inside/outside perspective, one of the biggest hurdles for this site was the bureaucratic BS that distracted the miniscule team from the critical tasks at hand. There is NO shortage of talent in the team, just a shortage of time, money, and support from the folks who signed on to support the project financially. And to the naysayers who are speculating about the site’s construction and coding, you cannot imagine the innovative, ground-breaking and truly breathtaking programming that went into the sadly short-lived success of the site. If you only knew… And don’t get me started on the passion with which our users bought into the world. Have YOU ever been on a site where the users are ASKING for things to spend real money on?
I love the look of this website. As a parent and also a user of Webkinz and Neopets, along with visiting other branded virtual world websites, I can list quite a few similar.
I don’t know much about the content of the Wuddle World, but if it could be modified to better suit some companies goals and interesting, I can see it’s acquisition to be a grand thing.
By just the look of the Wuddle World, I think it could be a good fit for some educational sites to expand and get kids to their sites instead of some of the other branded sites. Branded sites work because of the exsisting brand but few of them have the game content kids want.
Ideas of possible good partnerships for Wuddle off the top of my head are Scholastic.com (well know for encouging reading) or http://www.pbs.org/ (also well know for children’s broadcasting but they have always seem to have funding issues of their own).
I would love to let my kids play on Wuddle. Good luck, I really hope it works out well for Wuddle.
Ugh, I really hate the “virtual worlds and virtual pets are only for children” mentality and when people constantly make a big show of talking about the children as if they’re the only ones who like virtual worlds, virtual pets, ect. It sickens me that so many sites cater more to kids and in some ways often neglect their equally loyal and loving adult fans. I was a member of whuddleworld when it was fabulous and new, through the good and the bad, even briefly rejoined when they were allowing people to be joined only for the sake of commenting, ect. and it’s sad to know it’s probably never coming back. I may have hated the stupid test thing they put “new” users through in their second incarnation but I’d still rather see the site up and with all that then MIA and having financial difficulties…ect.
I can’t remember how long it’s been now since WW went down, but I still check the website address at least once a week, hoping to see it’s return. I am a 30 year old female who, upon a recommendation from a fellow pixel artist about 2.5 years (?) ago, joined the website and became instantly hooked. Without checking my paypal, I can’t give an exact figure of how many real-life dollars I spent there and I would do it again!
While the demographic was mostly female, there were quite a few males as well!
I don’t want to talk down about any other mentioned sites here, but as a former-hopeful member of WW, and a former member of Neopets, I can honestly say that I would choose WW any day! Neopets has gotten ‘too busy’ since it’s inception, imo. There’s just TOO much there! I guess I like ’simple’ (though I know there was nothing simple about the development), but as far as gameplay goes, there were quite a few things to do without being complicated.
I’m still remaining hopeful.
Attention fellow nerds:
whuddle World is back in business. Someone bought out the site and now the graphics look crap, but a well.
Caz sadly the new owners have taken on an artist who knows nothing about the style/type of art used on WW.
As a former artist for WW I’m sad to see the visual turn they’ve taken.
Whuddleworld has always been primarily a pixel based site. All of the major graphics are done pixel by pixel with the pencil tool. These new items were made with the use of the dodge, burn and smudge tools etc.
Tooling (as it’s called) can look very nice, but it does not match anything else on the site and just seems wrong.
I represent a small group of investors who have brought WhuddleWorld back online. We finished beta testing and had our rollout on Feb. 21, 2009. While the quality of the artowrk was, sadly, not up to previous standards when Cait’s email was written, we now have a dedicated group of pixel artists (including Cait Leslie) and a quick glance at the site will show that we are easily up to past standards. Also, a perusal of the posts in out forums will demonstrate that we have a fanatically loyal user base and our members LOVE the site. Go to alexa and look at our stats. Our pageviews are in the 12-16 range and our time on site is over 40 minutes per visit. Practically no other site on the web is clos to these stats. In addition, our bounce rate is practically zero. All this demonstrates that we have something that a certain demographic is eagerly looking for and I am certain that our future looks promising. I’d be most interested in having anyone look at the site and give me their honest criticism of what we’re doing.
I’ve never tried WhuddleWorld but I will take a look. The previous commenter and new owner says it has 12-16 range page views?? That must mean 12-16 thousand? Otherwise it sure sounds really small!