The swashbuckling exploits of Captain Jack Sparrow and his scurvy mates have been followed by millions of children around the world. Early next year Britain’s would-be pirates will get a chance to join the crew. Disney is preparing to launch a British version of Pirates of the Caribbean online, a game where players can create their own pirate character and form crews with other participants, sailing the seven seas in search of booty.

Before Pirates of the Caribbean is revamped, Disney will launch a British version of Club Penguin, a hugely popular web-site aimed at preteens where players can live a virtual life as a colourful penguin. The company is also overhauling Disney.co.uk to be more closely tailored to the British market.

The company’s American site, Disney.com, was recently relaunched with a team in north Hollywood rejigging the content twice a week. New shows are added, old ones dropped, games are launched. And the audience likes it. In August the channel received a record 23 million visitors, 24 per cent more than a year ago. After years of false starts, the Internet is now at the forefront of the Disney empire.

The digital renaissance is coming in the nick of time as television executives start to sweat about declining audiences and children — early adopters of technology — increasingly turn to the internet for their entertainment.

Research by the children’s television channel Nickelodeon found that 86 per cent of 8 to 14-year-olds are playing games online, more than 51 per cent are watching television shows and videos online and 37 per cent are sending instant messages. Traditional television viewing is still strong in the youngest audience but by the time they reach their teens, the internet is winning out. In the long run, media companies that fail to keep up with their net-savvy kids may not have an audience at all.

So far two firms have emerged as the biggest players for kids online, Disney and Nickelodeon’s parent company Viacom. When it comes to grabbing children’s attention, Viacom is Disney’s closest rival. Nickelodeon is home to Spongebob Squarepants, Jimmy Neutron and a host of world famous cartoon characters. The company’s 2005 acquisition of Neopets, a virtual world of digital cuddly pets, now looks pioneering and, at $160m (£80m), cheap. Earlier this year Disney spent $350m buying Club Penguin.

Nickelodeon has announced a $100m expansion of its online casual gaming ventures. The money will go towards new multi-player online games, virtual worlds and gaming titles during the next two years.

While Disney was an early, and not always successful, fan of the internet, Steve Wadsworth, president of the Walt Disney internet group, said that it was only in the last one or two years that the Internet had truly emerged as an equal to the company’s television channels, theme parks and films.

“The beauty of the Internet,” said Wadsworth, “is that it can do so many different things.” For shows like Hannah Montana, High School Musical and Power Rangers, Disney has set up special events, interactive worlds and online games. “People look at Disney as a world and it means different things to different people. To some its about films, for others its about a character or the theme parks,” said Wadsworth. “And there are world’s within worlds, so for a 13-year-old boy it may be about Pirates of the Caribbean. It’s a bit like taking the idea of a theme park and recreating it in a virtual space.”

The two firms have markedly different approaches to kids in cyberspace. Steve Youngwood, executive vice-president of digital media at MTVN, the Viacom division that runs Nickelodeon, said the aim of his sites, including Nick.com, was to be “a home base for kids and teens”. “But we need to be open. We need, too, to go beyond what we produce,” he added.

Youngwood points to Viacom’s purchase of Addicting-games.com, a site that offers hundreds of online games and directs visitors to other gaming websites. “Anyone who likes gaming can come back to us and know they can trust us as a filter,” he said. Nick.com will also carry advertisements for films and television shows that are not Viacom products.

For Disney the online experience is about remaining true to the Disney universe. It may not carry other people’s advertisements on Disney.com but the company creates so much content that it hardly needs to look outside its own kingdom. Disney has been creating virtual worlds from its inception and has “a deeper toy box” than most of its rivals, said one executive at Disney.

While both sites charge subscriptions, Neopets carries ads while Club Penguin is ad-free. Disney feels it is inappropriate to aim ads at such a young audience. Other observers are more cynical. “Club Penguin is basically a big ad for itself,” said one media executive. When it comes to older children and adults, sites like MySpace, YouTube and Face-book, where people create their own “user-generated” content, have attracted big audiences.

Wadsworth said Disney’s strategy was to allow children to be creative but within Disney’s context. It’s a model that has proved successful elsewhere. World of Warcraft, an online game where players undertake magical quests as wizards, dwarves and elves, has 9.3 million players world-wide. Second Life, a virtual community where people have to create their own characters and decide how to spend their time, claims millions have set up accounts in its world but only a fraction of those people are regular visitors.

Children want to be creative and feel “empowered” said Youngwood. “But they also need to be given the right tools,” he said. An open platform like YouTube where users can put up any video they have created would not work as well for a younger audience.

“The communities on Face-book or YouTube are relatively small. People don’t tend to have more than 20, 30 or 100 friends,” said Wadsworth. Providing a context brings far more people together. As everyone is clearer on what they are buying it also makes it easier for Disney to sell the idea to advertisers and to charge parents for subscriptions ($5.95 a month in America).

Parents will soon be coughing up for mobile-phone features too. Both firms have been developing their mobile plans. Wadsworth believes that in the near future mobile devices will be just another way to access the internet and is developing his strategy accordingly.

Disney has had some setbacks in mobile. Its attempts to launch its own phones in America ended in failure. Now it is going into partnership with mobile operators and has studios in Prague, Hollywood and Beijing developing mobile content.

Its biggest mobile market is Japan, where girls download Disney ringtones and images of characters. Japan also has a Disney-themed virtual world, Disney Wonder Days, that can be accessed via mobile devices.

“The PC connected to the Internet is far more robust than mobile at this point, particularly for our demographic,” said Wadsworth. “But mobile is increasingly becoming an important platform.” Given the vulnerable nature of their audience, both companies work hard to ensure their safety. But often it is the kids themselves who get out of hand. Swearing is electronically banned on Disney’s messaging systems but some users have found creative ways round it. For a while, until a sharp-eyed Disney employee added the phrase to the banned list, kids were describing something good as “sofa king great”.

Disney and Viacom executives could be forgiven for using similar terms for their now profitable internet ventures. Now all they have to worry about is the rest of the empire.