The Cult of the NeoPet

Wired is running an article examining the ups and downs of the Neopet Addiction. The overly cute online 'game' mostly consists of teaching kids to look at ads, but somehow has developed a large following online. From the article: "A generation agrees. Neopets has a staggering 25 million members worldwide. It has been translated into 10 languages and gets more than 2.2 billion pageviews per month. These dedicated Neopians spend an average of 6 hours and 15 minutes per month on the site. That makes Neopets the second-stickiest site on the Internet - ahead of Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, and eBay, according to Media Metrix. What's more, its demographics are the stuff of marketers' dreams: Four out of five Neopians are under age 18, and two out of five are under 13." Relatedly, Kotaku has a quick blurb about the Scientology backdrop against which this cuteness is projected. Update: 12/09 19:14 GMT by Z : Fixed broken link. There's a bug there, methinks.

Comments

Re:Neopets Founders?

[Otter]

I've come close to crossing swords with that group in the past, and I must say I'm not keen on doing so in the future.

Given that there's nothing Scientology-related about the NeoPets game, that the internal work practices there seem to be at worst weird and that the Scientology angle only came up from someone looking to (mildly) badmouth the company -- I don't see any need to "cross swords" with people who are minding their own business and certainly not harming you.