Neopets

About

Neopets is a website that features virtual pets users can adopt and care for. The site was founded by Adam Powell and Donna Williams in 1999. Pet owners can open up virtual shops, play games, earn and spend money within the world of the game.

History

After two years of prep work by founders and college students Adam Powell and Donna Williams, Neopets.com was launched on November 15th, 1999.^[4] The site expanded its languages to include German, Dutch, and Chinese, among others in 2004. In June 2005 Viacom bought Neopets for $160,000,000.^[5] The site design, as well as the appearance of many of the pets were redone in 2007.^[6] The site has the victim of a major identify theft scam in July 2009, when young users were convinced to leave the site to visit another that downloaded malware onto their computers.^[7]

Reception

In August 2001 Neopets was the fourth most popular site on the web, ranked an entire eight spots above Google.^[10] It was dubbed a "sticky" site because users tended to stay on the site for long periods of time.

Types of Neopets

There are fifty-four species of Neopets including Poogle, Uni and Bruce. Thirty-one are trademarked.^[1] Like Pokemon some types resemble animals (Bruce, for example, appears to be a penguin wearing a bow tie) while others, like Gnorbu aren't similar to any animal. Each species has its own biography that explains its traits and what kind of environment it lives in. Neopet users may choose the animals color and name once it's adopted.

There are also over 250 species of petpets, pets you can buy for your Neopet. Species include Dofrey, Yullie, and Turtum.

Scientologist Ownership

On April 18th, 2018, The Outline^[12] published an article titled "Neopets Was Run By Scientologists," reporting that the original owners of Neopets were intimately linked to the Church of Scientology and employed various practices linked to the organization, including the use of L. Ron Hubbard's Org Board business model. The article contained statements from Neopets creators Donna Williams and Adam Powell, who were intially unaware of the scientologist takeover:

“We found out about it about 6 months after we started working there and started googling all the employees and they were all Scientologists. It was weird, we just didn’t mention it until they hired this lady who wanted to bring Scientology onto the site. We fought that as hard as we could and they got rid of her.”

The following day, Christine Teigen posted several tweets about Neopets, not that she was a "comment board moderator" and "won multiple caption contests" (shown below).^[11]

Features

Neopia

The world of Neopets is called Neopia. This is the universe where users care for and play with their neopets. Areas of Neopia include Kwark Island, Brightvale, and Neopia Central. Neopia Central is where most of the shops can be found, as well as the bank, art centre, and Money Tree.

Language

The words used in Neopia such as the species of neopets and some of the items in the shop are collected under the umbrella of their own language, Neopian. I audio Neopian pronunciation guide is available on the site.^[2] For an even more extensive reference, the site also offers a Neopedia^[3] that contains over 270 articles on all things relating to the Neopets world.

Currency

Items needed for the care (or style) or users' pets can be purchased with Neopoints. As of January 2014 a new user receives 2,500 Neopoints for creating an account. To earn Neopoints once you have an account users can play games of visit the Money Tree.

Traffic

Neopets receives over 50,000 visitors a month from the United States alone as of Novemeber 2013.^[8] 57% of their traffic comes from the United States, with 8.5% coming from Canada, 4.7% from Germany, and 4% from the UK.^[9]

Search Interest

External References