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Comment by rwebb | Hacker News Reader

being able to serve kid-targeted ads to kids on the web would be awesome. massive click-throughs i bet....and somewhat slimy. even better would be parental control on what ads were served to their kids. give the parents a cut on CPC if they let their kids see ads? spitballin...

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This would go directly against one of the statements and some of the company policies stated on the website. On the 'Learn More' page,

"At PikLuk, we value your privacy and that of your children. To that end, we: Do not market to your children."

bummer. i bet kids love clicking on ads.

The very young and the very old are much more likely to click on ads because they are less likely to differentiate between advertisements and content.

Interesting how life is cyclical like that.

rwebb is right, serving "limited" ads to kids could be a huge... You are directly reaching an audience that companies spend millions of dollars just trying to.

Rather than seal yourself off from this potential revenue source you might want to re-phrase the wording on your site to say that you do not allow unnapproved/offensive ads to reach their kids. I honestly wouldnt feel bad if you offered limited ads since your service is free. I dont think parents will mind as long as the ads are carefully filtered for offensive content.

Wow, you are in essence the gate keeper to the ads kids can see. If ad agencies dont go through you then they cant reach your highly desirable user base, even if they are already advertising on the web page that the child is viewing (b/c you block them). That is just huge.

Sorry if I'm thinking "evil" here, but I'm just offering suggestions with purely business interests in mind.

Being evil would be replacing adsense advert blocks with your own publisher code :D I'm sure if not illegal that would be highly evil.

Children click on adverts, but do they 'convert' - leads or sales. If they do not, that click revenue is going to diminish quickly as advertisers start to realize.

Well, an advertiser is pretty dumb if they are trying to sell something to an 8 year old without a credit card. I imagine that a more likely target is a corporation trying to brand a child, like with General Mills's http://www.millsberry.com/.

Sure - I agree. But as far as I see it's harder to get 'branding advertising deals', than results based advertising.

Children dont convert ads to sales, they get their mommies to do that for them.

I'm not married nor do I have kids, but I have definitely seen the effects of a child desiring something. Often that desire comes from the influence of an advertisement.

I dont think online ads have traditionally targeted young kids much because there is not really a reliable means to focus in on them. The demographic can be very specific (as far as age range). Pikluk could be an new way to target a specific age bracket on the internet, which would be very desirable to advertisers.

I hear you about the legal issue of blocking ads and replacing them with your own though. People might have serious problems with that..

There is too much money to be made from advertising to ignore that revenue stream. Without it, all you've got is premium subscriptions and the premium subscription becomes more compelling if the free version has ads/doesn't have the adblocker.

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