Lane Merrifield

speaker

487 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Oct 2025 last heard 1 Oct

Lane Merrifield’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Oct 2025 with 1.

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Money Rehab with Nicole Lapin · The Double-Edged Sword of the "Shark Tank Effect" with Club Penguin Cofounder Lane Merrifield · 1 Oct 2025 podcast

Obviously, all that content had to be created by employees who had to be paid.

And so we needed to make sure that we had some sort of an annual recurring revenue in place for them.

Well, that and frankly, we were dealing with such a young group of kids.

One of the things that we saw that was really insidious back then on the web was the way that websites would be established to try and click kids from very innocent areas of the web.

And sadly, because there was very little policing of what ads went where, within about three, four clicks, a six or seven or eight-year-old could be in a really bad part of the internet just by clicking through ads.

And so it's gotten better, but it still is not ideal.

And we also felt like, well, if we're going to charge parents for this, then it should be ad-free.

And we didn't want to try and take money from them.

And we were offered a lot of money.

I mean, we have big companies offering a lot of money to be able to put their logos somewhere in Club Penguin.

But for us, it also suspended the notion of this, you know, we lost the suspension of disbelief.

My first job was at Disneyland, so I was a big Disney fan.

And to me, I thought like if there was billboards all over Disneyland advertising, I mean, in some ways there are, but it's not as blatant as it is in other theme parks.

And we wanted to kind of keep that same notion of letting the creativity of the world be on the forefront.

Yeah.

I mean, one of the things I love most about tech is that you can find win-wins.

It's not a zero-sum game.

Someone doesn't have to lose in order for someone else to win.

And so for me, whenever I talk to entrepreneurs about a variety of business models, and there's so many great ones out there now, especially as payment systems have gotten more sophisticated, it's gotten easier and cheaper to add different types of payment systems.

People understand what microtransactions are now, which they didn't back in the day.

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