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Neopets Case Study Essay

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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…

However unlike games such as World of Warcraft and Second Life that are based on real time action rendered in 3D, Neopets is primarily based on navigating through static 2D web pages, and playing small self contained puzzle-type games. Though Second Life and World of Warcraft do not target Neopet’s primary audience of girls under the age of 18, it also needs to move up the technology chain. There might soon be a 3D virtual pet website which might take away market share from Neopets and Neopets might see its adopter surfing to a 3D virtual pet websites.

Promotion strategy for Neopets :

Neopets has traditionally depended on word of mouth and viral marketing which is a subset of word of mouth to increase its spread. As per Hindle, Tim (2008, p205) viral marketing involves choosing a small group of well-connected individuals to launch a product or service via the internet or their mobile phones. The idea is that their approval will spread rapidly via their online network of connections, create a buzz around the product being marketed and result in millions of sales. This form of marketing has grown further with the popularity of social networks like Facebook.

While Neopets is very popular with kids who use the internet extensively, Neopets needs to consider other mediums to attract kids who are not yet extensive users of the internet. To do that Neopets has

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