On a useful site I have just discovered, worldscreen.com, there is an interview with Jim Samples, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the Cartoon Network. Here is part of what he says:
"...before managing Cartoon Network, I managed the New Media area. That was around 1999, 2000. At that time, Cartoon Network started investing heavily in online assets. We tried very short-form programming in Flash. We created what we called Web Premiere Toons. We tried online trading cards. We tried a whole bunch of stuff. And the thing that we learned very early on, by around 2001, was that what kids liked most online was playing games with all the characters they love from the shows. Much of our strategy has been around that and we have been happy with that. Games drive the majority of the traffic on cartoonnetwork.com."
What I find interesting about this is not so much the conclusion that they reached but the fact that in order to find out what really appeals to kids, they tried all kinds of things. Most of those were, by conventional standards, failures. But they were also successes because they led to the one thing that works best. With the internet at our disposal it's easier than ever to try things out at relatively low cost in order to find out what works.
One example: if you create something that can go on YouTube or Google Video, and you make, say, 100 people aware of it, the extent to which they tell others (and therefore the extent to which it is something that people really like) will be reflected in the number of hits it receives.