Neopets – Case Study

As per the Neopets website, Neopets is an online youth-focused virtual world whose primary focus is to allow members to create and take care of virtual pets. In addition to virtual pets, it also offers games, auctions, trades and messaging. Neopets have been created in 11 languages and generates more than 5 billion pageviews per month. With nearly 200 games, weekly contests, discussion boards, plots and thousands of virtual items to collect, Neopets members are as passionate about the site as they are about their virtual pets. Neopets has approximately 44 million members, and in the fourth quarter of 2007, Neopets averaged approximately 3.5 million monthly unique visitors globally.

How to avoid becoming a fad : …show more content…

In the US Neopets could collaborate with popular kids recreational places like Chucky Cheese. Neopets could also associate itself with social causes related to domestic animals like sponsoring the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. In other words Neopets could augment its internet based presence and word of mouth promotion by traditional promotions used in the brick and mortar world.

Country specific challenges for Neopets :

Currently Neopets has many country specific websites which are in local languages and also provide options to advertisers to tailor their offering to be country specific. As it spreads across countries Neopets will need to be sensitive to country specific issues like the names of its pets, attitude in different countries towards pets, type of pets which are popular in different countries, games and puzzles specific to a country.

Neopets could consider alliances with local content development firms to create country specific content. Neopets should also tie up with local kids channels like local cartoon channels to promote its website. Neopets could also do a race/home country profiling of its audience in the US and that could give Neopets some leads on which type of pets, games, etc might be popular in different countries.

Criticism of Neopet’s practices :

Key criticism of Neopets has been in the area of immersive advertising. As