First, Barbie had Ken. Now, Barbie has a docking station. A new doll appearing on retail shelves this month is familiar in many ways — she’s got plenty of outfits — but she also has some unusual features. This Barbie functions as an MP3 music player.

And when her feet are plugged into the iPodesque docking station that she comes with, she unlocks pages and pages of games, virtual shops and online chatting functions on the BarbieGirls.com website.

The new doll is a roundabout way of charging for online content. Instead of asking young web surfers to enter their parents’ credit card numbers, BarbieGirls.com and other sites are sending customers to a real-world toy store first.

Some of these sites can be used in a limited way without purchasing merchandise — the better to whet young appetites — but others, like the popular Webkinz site, are of little or no use without a store-bought product or two (or three, or a dozen). With children’s leisure-time habits shifting online, toy companies are responding with new products that can be construed as fun both online and offline.

That Barbie in the docking station? Go to a physical store and buy her an extra outfit, and you get access to even more web content. Products like these represent a change not only in the design and function of toys, but also in how toy makers use their web properties.

Mattel, for instance, like many consumer goods companies, has until now treated Barbie.com, HotWheels.com and its 22 or so other websites as advertising forums, places to showcase toys with the hope that children will nag their parents for them. But now Mattel and others are trying to turn their sites into moneymakers in their own right.

About 3 million people have registered since April 27 on the BarbieGirls website, a virtual world where playing games can earn a visitor play money — “B Bucks” — that can be spent on miniskirts, tiaras or home accessories. And, that’s without Mattel advertising the BarbieGirls site, even on its Barbie.com home page.

New opportunity

Mattel’s new toy follows the success of Webkinz, a line of Web-savvy stuffed animals made by Ganz. Each Webkinz comes with a number code that, once entered online, starts an “adoption” process and ushers the owner into a virtual world that amounts to a “Second Life” for the grade-school set.

“Over the next few years, you’ll see a lot of companies finding ways to create products that are web-enabled,” said Marc Rosenberg, Chief Marketing Officer at Zizzle, the company that makes Pirates of the Caribbean toys. “The monetization for us comes from the product, and not from the web.”

The concept behind Web-connected toys is not new. In the late 1990s, a number of toy companies introduced physical goods that could be used to unlock online goodies. But concepts like physical telescopes that could zoom to far-away islands when aimed at an Internet-connected computer failed to become popular, in large part because Internet connections were too slow.

These days stores routinely sell out of the $10 to $13 Webkinz — pandas, lions, hippos and other animals that unlock the online fun on “Webkinz World.” There, on the site, customers can play with avatars of their pets, shop for them using “KinzCash”. “The Webkinz concept is still doing very well,” said Robert A Eckert, Mattel’s ChiefExecutive, in the company’s second-quarter earnings conference call. “That phenomenon is real, and will continue to do well.”

Virtual world

So real, indeed, that the starter set for the BarbieGirls site — sold for $59.99 — will be one of this holiday season’s main Barbie products. “For girls to understand the level of detail, the level of content, truly the experience of BarbieGirls,” Scothon said, “we wanted to allow them to play on the site.” Even as toy companies cash in, some media executives are wondering if they, too, might use physical products to generate new revenue for their websites.

Neopets.com, for instance, a virtual world of whimsical creatures and games, draws more than 10 million visitors a month, according to Viacom, which owns it, and while T-shirts and other Neopets-related merchandise are for sale, they are not the main draw.

MTV, a Viacom subsidiary, has started marketing toys that relate to its web content. Earlier this month, the network introduced a music video game, “Rock Band,” in partnership with Electronic Arts.

The game allows up to four people to play along with various songs using physical instruments hooked into an Xbox 360 or the PlayStation 3. Walt Disney Company, too, has gotten into the act. Last year, it introduced a digital camera that lets people download images of Disney characters from its website to their photos. Disney will introduce an analogous video camera this fall and has other online/offline toys in development, said Dunne of Disney.