We own and operate Chimpoo.com a free virtual world that allows kids (5-12) to own a cute monkey, play games, earn coins and spend virtual currency on their Chimpoo’s clothes, toys, et al. There are ‘golden bananas’ and monthly subscriptions that cost real money – which allows kids to buy more exclusive items on Chimpoo.
Since kids don’t have wallets, they have to pester their parents (95% moms) to buy these goodies for them. For all of us who have kids, we know that parents rarely say ‘sure, go ahead…let me get my wallet’. We procrastinate, delay and just hope that our kids will forget about that purchase. Buts kids rarely forget and keep pestering us till we finally succumb and ‘give-in’.
Chimpoo.com has calibrated the number of times kids from different countries visit the site till they become paying members. We have used data over the past 3 months across 500 actual payments made. We call it the ‘Give In’ moment – that exact moment when kids win and parents lose. The interesting story in the chart below is how the Give In moment varies across countries:
| Country of visitor | Number of visits by the child to chimpoo.com before the Parent paid |
| United Kingdom | 8 |
| Israel | 13 |
| United States | 13 |
| Brazil | 13 |
| South Africa | 14 |
| Italy | 14 |
| Australia | 16 |
| UAE | 17 |
| Malta | 21 |
| France | 21 |
| Singapore | 25 |
| Romania | 26 |
| New Zealand | 28 |
| Turkey | 31 |
| Mexico | 31 |
| Canada | 31 |
| Switzerland | 33 |
| Thailand | 48 |
| Poland | 54 |
| Portugal | 56 |
| India | 61 |
| Russia | 78 |
| Global Average | 13 |
The Global average is 13 visits, which means that it’s not really easy to convince your parents to buy anything for you at the snap of a finger.
Kids in the UK need to work the least (8 visits), kids in the USA (13 visits) are almost on par with the world – but it’s the kids in India (61 visits), for instance, who really have to slog hard!
Sure, there are economic reasons and just the resistance to ‘buy’ anything online, in the Asian markets. But over all, this could be a simple indicator to figure out, how often a new consumer kids’ online product or service will have to ensure repeat visits from the same customer to make the dollar fall in the cash register.
Authored by Alok Kejriwal – CEO and Co-Founder of Games2win.com.
alok@games2win.com
Games2win entertains approx 15 million unique users a month via its online gaming portals and mobile games (as per comScore) and is one of the leading online games businesses in India.