Lane Merrifield

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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

Well, by the time we were having those conversations with Apple was when we were rolling out our mobile app.

So we started on the web, right?

It was purely web-based back in the day.

And so thankfully, we had some time to convince them.

And it wasn't until we started showing them the numbers that we were able to kind of convince them.

And in fact, SubPenguin was one of the first that was allowed to actually use subscription model in the App Store.

But we didn't start in the App Store, right?

We started on the web.

So that was part of it.

But no, it felt like we were being hypocritical if we said we built this thing for kids to have a safe place online, but only wealthy kids.

And we really don't care about the others.

I mean, not to sound overly like sappy or altruistic, but we really said, hey, we want the core of this game to be available for everyone.

And, you know, for those parents who can't afford five bucks a month, right, they can help subsidize a lot of the kids out there that can't.

And all the kids are going to have a safe space.

I'd say we were somewhere between $50 and $100 million at that point.

And then post-Disney, we grew that up to well north of $150 million annually in AR, just from the subscription business, of course.

Then we added in consumer products and we were doing magazines and all sorts of things, which all added to that.

Ironically, people always ask about Club Penguin being shut down.

And there's a lot of reasons behind it.

One of the worst ones was Disney accidentally signing a contract with a credit card provider who was unwilling and they were unable to transition their subscriptions off of the previous provider onto this new one without canceling everyone's subscriptions and basically having to start from scratch.

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