Responsible approach, no joking matter

I write in response to children’s groups NCH and Childnet International that have condemned the Mykindaplace.com advertising campaign, aimed at teenage boys, as “irresponsible”.

The ads feature in Match, Nintendo and Computer & Video Games magazines. The titles were chosen because they specifically target boys aged between nine and 15 years old. The ads aims to appeal to the sense of humour of teenage boys and, therefore, had to contain cheeky and humorous elements to encourage them to log onto the site.

However, we take the safety issues in chat rooms extremely seriously and understand that they need to be carefully managed to maintain a fun and safe environment for teenagers to communicate.

In addition to software which filters swear words, phone numbers and e-mail addresses, Mykindaplace.com’s three chat rooms are monitored by people every minute of every hour they are open to prevent obscenities, the exchange of personal information and users arranging to meet. To our knowledge, we are the only teen website to do this.

We welcome criticism, but feel that in this case it is not justified. Protecting our teenage users is something that we do not take lightly, and we are using maximum resources to make our chat rooms as safe as possible.

Charlie Redmayne

Founder

Mykindaplace.com