NeoPets, fantasy site run by suits

NeoPets, fantasy
site run by suits

But what a place. Kids hang out virtually for hours

By Jeremy Schlosberg
       and Marty Beard

    Sometimes the most interesting stories are the wrong ones.
    That, in any case, accounts for this week’s Nielsen//NetRatings tale, which is the curious story of one of the web’s least-advertised but best-loved sites: NeoPets.com.
    Now claiming upwards of 13 million members, NeoPets.com is sort of a cross between Tamagotchis—you remember, those virtual pets on a key chain—and Pokémon, put onto a web site.
    NeoPets users create a so-called virtual pet, choosing species, sex and color, and care for it as they would a real pet. Only these are cartoonish creatures with names like Skeith and Blumaroo that live in a world known as Neopia. And they like to be entertained and trained by their owners, who are mostly teens.
    The site is one of the web’s stickiest, with typical users spending anywhere from two to six hours per visit, according to the company. It says NeoPets served up some three billion page views last month.
    But back to our story.
    We’re only bringing NeoPets.com up because the site abruptly showed up at No. 6 on the list of the web’s top advertisers for the week ending June 24, according to data received yesterday from Nielsen//NetRatings.
    As we do whenever we see an advertiser shoot up the charts, we called NeoPets.com to find out a bit about its ad strategy and what sort of major campaign it had launched to land it among the web’s top advertisers for the week.
    NeoPets informed us that it doesn't advertise.
    This prompted a number of clarifying interchanges between Media Life and NeoPets and between Media Life and NetRatings.
    In the end, it turned out to be a mistake, a glitch in which graphics on the NeoPets site were tallied as ads.
    But what did turn out to be quite interesting was learning more about the people at NeoPets and how they’ve turned what began as a college lark into a serious and profitable business.
    This is not a web site run by typical web entrepreneurs.
    Created by a British college student in 1999, NeoPets.com has been owned and operated since April 2000 by Dohring Market Research, a Glendale, Calif.-based firm that previously earned its keep providing custom market research to the automotive industry.
    The folks at Dohring think of NeoPets as an enterprise to be run much like any other.
    "All our executives are business people," says Lee Borth, the chief operating officer.
    "We come in every day in suits and ties. We’ve all worked together for years. We run it as a business and are always trying to improve the user experience, and that includes selling and delivering advertising."
    The original NeoPets had no advertising.
    The new management started selling ads as soon as it took over, and the company reports that it began turning a profit as of July 2000. That alone makes it unique, says Borth, adding "I can’t name five other profitable internet companies."
    If you suspect there’s some secret to NeoPets’ advertising success, you’re right. The site does not run standard banner ads. As a kids’ site it looks clean and wholesome and non-commercial.
    The advertising on NeoPets is more or less the interactive version of product placement.
    NeoPets calls it immersive advertising. "We take the client’s message or what they’re trying do with their product and we incorporate it into the site," says Borth.
    Thus are familiar products incorporated into what visitors see and do on NeoPets. They can feed the popular kids' drink Capri Sun to their pets, for example. And the site’s many games may contain products that have to be used or discovered or played with.
    Borth notes that the products can play a central role in the Neopia experience. Users will buy Capri Sun, talk about it in the chat rooms, trade it back and forth.
    "We were a research company before we had this business," he notes. "We do lots of research still. We did a study before we put Capri Sun on, and again a month or two later. It was amazing, the response from our members."
    NeoPets asked how people felt about having Capri Sun on the site. Borth reports that 3 percent didn’t like it, 44 percent didn’t care and more than 50 percent loved it.
    Respondents would say things that read like an advertiser’s dream, says Borth—kids writing in to say, "when I saw it on the site I had my mom go buy some for me."
    "So that’s how we make our money," he says.
      NeoPets’ advertisers include Kraft Foods, Miramax, Turner Broadcasting and Walt Disney’s Hollywood Records.
    While the concept of NeoPets is wacky-seeming and totally unlike anything that can be done via a standard one-way traditional medium, the underlying philosophy is as mainstream as you can imagine.
    "All the stuff that we hate on the internet we make sure is not on the site," says Borth. "You won’t see any pop-ups ever. You won’t see any email to our members.
    "You'll find nothing edgy. We’re not like some of these other dot.coms that are trying to show how they can run on the edge, with borderline curse words. We wanted it to be a place where our own kids could go and have a great time and spend hours doing it."
    Borth is happy to note the supportive email they get from parents who tell him that the site is not taking their kids away from wholesome activities like going outside.
    "They're still doing all the things they used to do and even still watching a lot of TV. But they come away a little brighter and they learn something.
    "They learn how to program html. We have tutorials throughout the site. We had a Warner Brothers cartoon artist talk to me the other day, and he said he learned how to do html off our site. It's quite a phenomenon."

Top 25 Properties
Property	Unique Audience	Reach %	Time
1. AOL Time Warner	37,952,198	51.00	0:16:14
2. Yahoo	30,172,285	40.54	0:28:38
3. MSN	27,295,878	36.68	0:23:23
4. Microsoft	9,885,545	13.28	0:04:49
5. Lycos Network	8,860,986	11.91	0:09:37
6. Excite@Home	8,719,083	11.72	0:13:26
7. eBay	7,234,419	9.72	0:38:58
8. About	5,986,715	8.04	0:07:13
9. Walt Disney Internet Group	5,857,400	7.87	0:13:46
10. eUniverse Network	4,821,087	6.48	0:07:57
11. Amazon	4,793,117	6.44	0:08:18
12. Google	4,586,885	6.16	0:06:34
13. CNET Networks	4,475,175	6.01	0:07:15
14. InfoSpace	4,298,223	5.78	0:04:57
15. Vivendi Universal	3,878,178	5.21	0:07:36
16. NBC Internet	3,508,809	4.71	0:05:44
17. ClassMates Online	3,468,766	4.66	0:05:36
18. Napster	3,262,422	4.38	0:06:07
19. Ask Jeeves	3,255,748	4.37	0:04:39
20. iWon	3,164,170	4.25	0:26:40
21. EarthLink	3,061,207	4.11	0:06:46
22. GoTo.com	2,931,182	3.94	0:02:05
23. AT&T	2,884,298	3.88	0:11:08
24. Gator.com	2,688,635	3.61	0:05:44
25. Viacom International	2,684,263	3.61	0:14:29
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Top Ten Advertisers
Advertiser	Impressions	Unique Audience	Reach %
1. Microsoft	408,920,592	25,988,376	34.92
2. Yahoo!	250,980,054	18,937,142	25.45
3. eBay	249,416,672	10,866,354	14.60
4. ClassMates	225,323,648	23,752,925	31.92
5. Barnes and Noble	169,467,426	22,609,050	30.38
6. Providian	148,030,619	17,993,760	24.18
7. Columbia House	136,276,817	19,750,650	26.54
8. Netscape	126,838,903	11,941,127	16.05
9. Amazon	118,257,494	20,199,670	27.14
10. Orbitz	117,206,394	11,973,560	16.09
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Top 25 Domains
Domain	Unique Audience	Reach %	Time
1. yahoo.com	27,820,978	37.38	0:29:36
2. aol.com	26,797,415	36.01	0:14:05
3. msn.com	25,084,711	33.71	0:20:28
4. passport.com	13,392,557	18.00	0:03:07
5. microsoft.com	9,339,605	12.55	0:04:40
6. geocities.com	6,882,773	9.25	0:05:10
7. ebay.com	6,671,214	8.96	0:39:13
8. netscape.com	6,027,659	8.10	0:09:17
9. go.com	5,654,852	7.60	0:14:05
10. excite.com	5,212,099	7.00	0:17:14
11. google.com	4,582,687	6.16	0:06:33
12. promotions.com	4,458,498	5.99	0:05:04
13. amazon.com	4,441,653	5.97	0:07:35
14. lycos.com	3,956,850	5.32	0:11:24
15. classmates.com	3,468,766	4.66	0:05:36
16. napster.com	3,262,422	4.38	0:06:07
17. iwon.com	3,164,170	4.25	0:26:40
18. about.com	2,949,244	3.96	0:05:58
19. goto.com	2,914,490	3.92	0:02:05
20. compuserve.com	2,868,279	3.85	0:18:36
21. nbci.com	2,740,575	3.68	0:04:42
22. msnbc.com	2,683,335	3.61	0:06:30
23. earthlink.net	2,662,910	3.58	0:07:06
24. gator.com	2,648,433	3.56	0:05:34
25. bluemountain.com	2,647,155	3.56	0:06:51
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Top 25 Advertising Domains
Domain	Impressions	Reach %
1. yahoo.com	1,376,000,000	32.95
2. msn.com	847,353,645	30.22
3. ebay.com	657,865,258	8.49
4. aol.com	455,179,572	22.66
5. netscape.com	196,268,050	7.46
6. neopets.com	178,428,266	0.76
7. excite.com	145,727,039	6.34
8. go.com	119,729,045	5.72
9. iwon.com	116,695,085	3.42
10. compuserve.com	90,612,646	3.40
11. mapquest.com	90,375,026	2.90
12. ezboard.com	74,466,233	1.00
13. audiogalaxy.com	73,868,790	0.91
14. infospace.com	73,129,994	2.19
15. lycos.com	68,327,494	3.81
16. about.com	65,225,091	2.72
17. dogpile.com	57,961,743	1.82
18. monster.com	57,726,412	1.89
19. cnn.com	56,307,189	2.46
20. gopher.com	55,835,727	4.37
21. realtor.com	54,924,606	0.89
22. passport.com	52,932,786	12.28
23. juno.com	44,822,295	1.65
24. pogo.com	41,600,695	1.54
25. att.net	40,308,483	2.16
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Top Ten Banners
Advertiser	Impressions	Unique Audience	Reach %
1. ClassMates	125,337,925	9,948,764	13.37
2. Colonize	33,587,387	8,371,155	11.25
3. Consumer Counseling	27,593,179	7,151,165	9.61
4. Bonzi Software	23,759,022	7,081,033	9.51
5. JP Morgan Chase	38,342,655	6,274,853	8.43
6. Consumer Counseling	24,533,370	6,232,487	8.37
7. JP Morgan Chase	37,251,165	5,986,766	8.04
8. ClassMates	25,953,567	5,781,836	7.77
9. Columbia House	12,397,217	5,267,006	7.08
10. Columbia House	13,070,775	5,259,478	7.07
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

Average Usage
	Current Week	Last Week	% Change
Number of Sessions per Week	6	6	0
Number of Unique Sites Visited	6	6	0
Page Views per Week	224	219	2.28
Page Views per Surfing Session	36	35	2.86
Time Spent per Week	3:10:06	3:08:06	1.06
Time Spent during Surfing Session	0:30:37	0:30:28	0.49
Duration a Page Viewed	0:00:51	0:00:52	-2.3
Average Click Rate for Top Banners	0.36	0.31	16.13
Active Internet Universe	74,420,575	74,071,194	0.47
Current Internet Universe Estimate	167,324,635	167,378,051	-0.03
Source: Nielsen//NetRatings

-Jeremy Schlosberg is the senior editor for new media. Marty Beard is a Media Life staff writer.

Printer-Friendly Version | Send to a Friend
Cover Page | Contact Us