{"id":50,"date":"2005-12-08T06:50:00","date_gmt":"2005-12-08T13:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/paulgillin.com\/2005\/12\/the-neopets-addiction.html"},"modified":"2005-12-08T06:50:00","modified_gmt":"2005-12-08T13:50:00","slug":"the-neopets-addiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/the-neopets-addiction\/","title":{"rendered":"The Neopets addiction"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Wired has an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.wired.com\/wired\/archive\/13.12\/neopets_pr.html\">interesting story on Neopets<\/a>, the online fantasy world that kids can&#8217;t get enough of. My daughter was seriously into this community for a long time, though she&#8217;s since graduated to more mature things. What always impressed me about Neopets is that it&#8217;s a pure grass-roots phenomenon. Without benefit of a TV show, comic book or any &#8220;traditional&#8221; media support, Neopets has grown to 2.2 billion page views a month and more than 20 million users. Neopets-branded merchandise sells in Target stores. This is a complete Web phenomenon, Web 2.0 before there was a term for Web 2.0.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s particularly amazing is that the average user spends 6.5 hours per month on Neopets. It is the ultimate sticky site.<\/p>\n<p>The Wired piece does find controversy in a concept the Neopets makers call &#8220;immersive advertising.&#8221; Activity areas on the site are increasingly designed by sponsors who pepper the scenery with product placements. There&#8217;s debate over whether kids who are already coping with obesity should earn points by watching cereal commercials but I suspect this is no different than the infomercials kids watch on TV these days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Wired has an interesting story on Neopets, the online fantasy world that kids can&#8217;t get enough of. My daughter was seriously into this community for a long time, though she&#8217;s since graduated to more mature things. What always impressed me &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/2005\/12\/the-neopets-addiction\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pTy95-O","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gillin.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}