Kids already spend gobs of time online.
Now Web companies want them to spend gobs of money there too. That, in massively oversimplified terms, was the gist of the discussion Tuesday at Digital Kids, a conference debating how companies can best connect with the growing pool of Internet users age 18 and younger. The conference drew an assortment of Web companies, market analysts, and offline firms. That well-known market dynamic creates some challenges for Web companies that draw heavy traffic from the younger set. Barbour's contention is that selling to kids over the Internet is in many ways no different from selling to kids anywhere else.