According the latest post from the Hitwise blog, MoshiMonsters.com (a children’s social networking/gaming site) has started to make some noticeable traction against Club Penguin and Webkinz. Below is a summary of the post:

• Moshi Monsters offers visitors the chance to adopt a pet monster and take care of their monster by earning a virtual currency called ‘Rox’ through solving educational puzzles that test math, logic and vocabulary skills.
• The volume of visits to MoshiMonsters.com increased 23x within the Entertainment – Games category for the week ending March 20, 2010 as compared to the same week last year. In comparison, visits to Club Penguin increased 20% last week year-over-year while visits to Webkinz were down 41%.\Last week, Google.com was the highest referral source to MoshiMonsters.com, responsible for 24% of the upstream traffic to the website and 74% of those visits were from returning visitors (meaning visited the website in the past 30 days).
• The share of returning visitors from Facebook and YouTube, the 2nd and 3rd ranked websites for referrals were even higher at 82% and 86%, respectively.
• As with the UK, the visitors to Moshi Monsters tend to be from affluent families that are likely be more willing to pay for a membership to use the website.