Disney.com has long lauded itself as the "Number One family destination" online, despite the fact that its flagship site has essentially been promotional shovelware since day one. But with today's reinvention of Disney.com as a more content-rich site, plus an upcoming revision that will transform Disney's Daily Blast into a veritable AOL for kids, Disney is starting to focus heavily on its online image. And if there's one image Disney wants to convey, it's family safety.
"Parents don't have much consumer confidence on the Web - it's mostly kids taking control," says Liz Randolph, kids analyst for Jupiter. "The Disney brand name already goes along with content that parents and kids look at together.... People will definitely think of [Daily Blast] as a safe environment to plop their kids in front of the computer."
The relaunch of two-year-old Disney.com divides the site into four content channels: Kids will contain games and quizzes, as well as reruns of older Daily Blast content; Family will bring Disney's old standalone Family.com parental advice magazine into the Disney.com fold; Today@Disney will hold the promotional materials for current Disney products, and Shop is for buying Disney-branded gifts.
"Disney.com's big paradigm shift is that it's moving from being a business and promotion site to a destination for families," explains Richard Wolpert, executive vice president of Disney Online. "Nowadays people are looking more for a place for entertainment and information - it's an evolution that fits with the evolution of the Web."
More intriguing, however, are the Daily Blast updates that will happen on 17 November.
Disney launched its Daily Blast kids' site in May with a minimum of fanfare, offering it for free to MSN subscribers and to the general Web public for US$4.95 a month, $39.95 yearly. After six months, Disney's turning the site into a full kids' service: offering email, chat, and real-time collaborative games. The service will use its own D-browser, which will work much like a standard browser, but within restricted areas. A slew of high-tech games, 3-D worlds and play programs will be released this spring.
While the changes are designed to give Daily Blast the community and interactivity it lacked before, they are also taking the controls and putting them firmly into the hands of password-yielding parents. Children won't be able to add "buddy's" (for email, chat or instant messaging) unless they get parental approval; neither will they be able to receive email from anyone without the parent's go-ahead. The proprietary browser eliminates the "danger" of kids finding their way onto the Big Bad Web, and an upcoming comic series called Cyber Netiquette will train children about the do's and don'ts of being online.
"There's definitely a lot of fear [of the Net], and most of that fear comes through ignorance - they don't know what's out there and how it works. We're trying to empower parents with tools and education," says Wolpert. "We feel we have a moral responsibility to do everything we can about making parents as comfortable as possible."
As well as reaffirming Disney's role as protector of the family, the online products are giving Disney a chance to test-drive new material. Recent content like "the Fridge of Horrors" veers into Ren-and-Stimpy-esque grotesqueness. With a goal of 50 percent of characters being online exclusives (rather than reusing Hercules, Cinderella, or the Lion King) Disney's starting to turn Daily Blast into a whole new world of Disney characters that might eventually be extended into other mediums.
