Skullsplitter wrote:
Uh huh, you do realise the whole premise of neopets being so wicked was the "immersive advertising" that they use. They didnt have banners and popups, they had sponsor games, items and things, and large, wealthy companies like mcdonalds pay them vast sums of money to display their greasy goodness to all the millions of pageviews each month. That is where the bulk of their income comes from.
Since I started, I have seen a huge increase in the number of people playhing neopets, but I have not seen a proportional increase in the number of staff. Ergo, approximately the same number of people are serving a larger number of players. They do not now employ 500 people who all need paying, so the increased expenditure they have is due to server traffic. Luckily for them, as their traffic increases, so too does the attraction to large sponsors, who say "yeah, look at that, they get so many views, we need to get in there!" and as such, TNT make more profit as they get more players.
The plushies, cards, t-shirts etc are all ways for them to make more money. Lovely.
But they are putting more and more time into promotions and less time into the content of the site. Wow a big anti-climax this war was, some would say predicatably. They just thought "nah, we have a mcdonalds deal coming up, drop this BFMII nonsense" and had a drab "oh yeah, um, the bad guy dies, the end" finish for the war, and some lousy weapons. Great.
Couple this with a lack of improvement to the support service they offer, as well as their efforts to hamper people's enjoyment of the game, either through making restocking + games hard or wrong freezings which incidentally dont work and opens up a whole new argument, support for the site WILL eventually start to dwindle.
And if their pageviews go down, their appeal to sponsors goes down, and eventually the site winds down to nothing.
It could quite easily expand into the strasphere. LISTEN to your players TNT, we really dont care about promotions more than the site.
Oh, and BTW, about a year or so ago, it was leaked from some neopets press-report thing that the turnover in a year for TNT was around $7,000,000 due to big sponsors such as disney, mcdonalds etc. I imagine it is quite a bit higher now and the neopets team arent in... "dire financial straights" and are in fact doing quite well, enjoying neglecting the site to an extent in order to squeeze more blood from the stone of merchandise.
Great point and I completely agree!! It's not the fact that they advertise and have merchandise, it's that the site is being put second behind the merchandise.