People start companies for a wide variety of reasons. Bob Dahlstrom started Kidsnet for a reason that many can relate to: to protect his daughter while she was online.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Associate Editor [November 24, 2003]

"I was a college professor at Florida State University (FSU)," Bob Dahlstrom recounts. "I taught our tech skills boot camp. We had a multimedia and marketing program, but the students didn't always have the skill level we wanted them to have."

The boot camp wasn't easy. "We set up an intranet in the lab on day one. The purpose was to demystify the Internet."

Nowadays, the Internet worries Dahlstrom. The marketing brochure for Kidsnet blares this headline: "30% of young girls sexually harassed online. Only 7% told their parents—USA Today, 2002."

The fear is real and personal for him. "My daughter was growing up, and the filters were inadequate. A lot seemed like censorship. They couldn't tell you why or how stuff got on the blacklist. Or they used filtering based on keywords or phrases. None of them worked very well and even today don't work that well."

Dahlstrom's insight was a basic one. "I decided to use people," he says. "I used content rating standards from the Internet Content Rating Association. I bought a list of websites from Alexa that covers 98 percent of the Web."

Four years later, Kidsnet had employed "hundreds of people" to build a massive database consisting of information on billions of sites, covering such subjective questions as whether a site qualifies as having, "nudity in an artistic context."

Kidsnet launched its product it January of 2003 with little fanfare. Dahlstrom started reaching out to ISPs in the summer, around June. "ISPs need to compete with the SBCs and the Earthlinks that are providing protection. We're able to co-brand and private label this service."

It's not easy to build a good service. "Many companies have tried to do this and failed," notes Dahlstrom. "The original iMacs had iKids. They had teachers review websites, but it was a whitelist and the universe was too small. AOL used to be that way. One company that we crawled had barely 7,000 sites. Now AOL is better, but it is using blocking and filtering and it blocks Yahoo! and Google. It has to, because kids could otherwide search for porn and keep clicking on links until they got through."

He says that some sites make what appear to be political decisions, blocking the National Association of Women (NOW) or Planned Parenthood.

Dahlstrom says the software is built to give control to parents, not to his company. "If a parent disagrees with our rating, they can allow it, or they can request an expedited review from our team. If a parent want to allow a kid access to the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue, they can, but we have it listed under the intimate apparel category."

The company retains a small portion of its once-massive website review staff to handle requests from users. "I expect our staff to grow as we get more ISP customers," Dahlstrom says. "Right now, we've gone to Europe and added UK sites to keep our reviewers busy."

For an issue this sensitive, Dahlstrom sees no technological replacement for the human eye. He may well be right. Any ISP considering this service should take a look at Kidsnet. ISPs may also like the fact that the Kidsnet subscription is cancelled if a user cancels their ISP subscription.

We spoke to Phil Schnyder, president of the Perry, Fla.-based ISP Gulf Internet and of askSam Systems, which provides a database that Kidsnet uses.

Schnyder says that Kidsnet allowed him to be responsive to his community and to offer something that the ILEC could not. When the ISP started, as an add-on to the software company, its T-1 line cost almost $3,000 per month. "We lost money for a few years," he admits.

Since then, he has added customers and cut costs, and is more or less at breakeven, which was the original goal.

Dahlstrom is reaching out to other small ISPs. "At ISPCON, we met a huge number of WISPs," he says. He sees WISPs as a promising market for the software.

He's also targeting other business opportunities with other versions of the software. "We have an end user product, a product for ISPs, and a product for businesses, all built around our human reviews," says Dahlstrom.

For the future, Kidsnet is working on adding content filtering for e-mail and instant messaging. Stay tuned.

Pricing and availability
The product is sold to ISPs based on a price to end users of $40 per year. For 100 licenses, the annual price is $2,400 ($24 per user per year). Prices decrease rapidly for volume orders. For 20,000 licenses, the price is half the starting price, $12 per user per year, for a total payment of $240,000.

To qualify for a co-branded product, an ISP must order at least 500, and to qualify for a private label product, an ISP must order at least 5,000.

The company also has a partnership program through which ISPs can sell a version of Kidnet optimized for business to their small- and medium-sized business customers. Pricing and revenue share arrangements are not disclosed. The company has already signed up one major dialup wholesaler.

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