Taomee, China’s Club Penguin, IPOs on NYSE [Slideshare]

Taomee, a popular children’s SNS, listed on the NYSE yesterday. It received a slightly disappointing reception as Chinese stocks have continued to struggle in recent months. Still, there’s no shortage of additional China tech stocks in the pipeline.

Taomee operates five virtual worlds for 5-15 year-olds, including China’s two most popular: “Mole’s World” and “Seer”. A premium monthly subscription (Taomee’s most popular product) to one of the virtual worlds, costs RMB 10 ($1.5). Taomee is similar to Club Penguin in the US, which Disney purchased for about $700 million in 2007.

Our iChinaStock team (my employer) created a presentation that looks at Taomee’s biz model, users, and product:

The site Digital Due Diligence posits that Taomee’s popularity is dropping while its competitors are gaining based on Baidu search traffic and Google trends traffic. I’m never sure just how much importance to assign to these traffic measures, but it is an important data point.

Baidu search volume (blue is Taomee's Mole World, green is Tencent's Roco Kingdom)

I will say that Tencent is seemingly the enemy of every other site on the Chinese internet, and a formidable opponent at that. Its “Roco Kingdom” children’s SNS is also one to watch.