Tech giants keep struggling to attract children and teens (and sometimes adults as well) who are using their own or parents’ tablets and smartphones to log on to “free” games. Adults are afraid that this shift could lead to large bills for in-app purchases made by children while playing the games. Moreover, this trend also threatens to allow access to adult social media websites.

At the same time, new media companies are being disrupted by the shift to mobile technology and are trying to do their best and find ways to make their products profitable. For example, the UK-based Mind Candy accounts for over 80 million children registered to its Moshi Monsters virtual world, but it still admits that the company has found it very hard to follow children to mobile devices.

The company has recently launched PopJam – a new mobile application regarded as a safe alternative to Instagram for teenagers and children. PopJam allows taking pictures, customizing them with digital scribbles and stickers, and sharing them with friends. The problem was that children didn’t have their own application to share their voice and creativity. As a result, they were increasingly joining up to grown-up social networks – Facebook, Tumblr, Snapchat and Instagram. The company is “pre-moderating” images before they are published, and recommend kids not to share selfie photos, unless their faces are disguised with the digital stickers.

In the meantime, games for adults have attracted many children, despite the fact that they sell virtual currency as in-app purchases. Here the problem is that lots of things possible for adult apps and game apps are really frowned upon in a lot of children’s content. The alternative is charging upfront for kids’ apps, but their parents usually don’t want to pay. This is why children are mostly playing the “free-to-play” games instead.

Mind Candy hopes that their new app PopJam will eventually be able to make money from parents who pay a small monthly subscription fee to unlock extra features for their kids. The industry must realize that today kids have their own devices to play games, read stories, listen to music, watch videos, and communicate with other children – and this is the area that can be monetized in the future.