Neopets in Time Mag.

[Hiromu]

Time Magazine approached the subject of Neopets like a plumber giving a lecture on coronary bypass surgery.

That's a pretty good analogy. It's just like anything else where people (who have no interest in this sort of game or site) try to pass off opinions on something they really don't understand. Obviously if they would have asked any of the parents who play or let their kids play, they would have found that it's really not a big deal. I don't ever remember anyone ever talking about how annoying it is that Neopets has tiny little advertisements on their site. TNT is just doing what it can to keep their site free (and doing a pretty darn good job of it too).[/quote]

[digitel_anime_fan_20]

actually, it might be an elephante. these statistics are basically negative against neopets.

Elephantes are not furry... I think it is a Uni.

shesh, now i KNOW eyries are under aprriecated.

the pet they were describing must be an eyrie...although they didn't say feathery, think abou it, do eyries even LOOK feathery? (there in lies a good reason why they should have a minor make-over...but i swear, if TNT cutifies them, i will scream... )

anyway, that artical has so many facts wrong, it's not funny...330 np, PRICEY? if that was the case, then everybody in neopia must be rich.
it's only pricey for younger players who arn't very good at game playing, or simply don't play the games a lot. *shakes head*

as for the advertising, for goodness sakes, would they rather to have to pay to play? Better 'ole mcy donalds pays then me. >_>
and the commericals? who says people actully watch those things? (the ones that pay you np) i have once or twice, i usually did somthing else till they were done.

shesh...i could go on all day.

[_bubbabubba_]

I never knew 330NP was a lot of NP.I earn about 5,000 a day just off of a couple flash games.I can earn more I'm just too lazy to.It is unfair that they targeted Neopets though.You could fill Time Magazine full of nothing but sites that have ads and still not have enough room I bet.Did they mention any other sites on it?

[Catgrrrrrrl]

I just don't see why "immersive" advertising is so much worse than regular commercials. It's a lot less annoying in my opinion. In fact, I enjoy seeing the real-life food stuffs in shops. I try to collect all the real-life stuff sometimes. It's usually cute.

Also, you don't have to play sponsor games or feed the sponsor items to your pets. It's all completely optional. I wish they'd do that with TV.

I'm really disapointed in Time magazine for printing something this poorly written. Maybe I should complain to them and offer to write a real article about Neopets. They'll have to pay me of course. I have really stellar credentials on Neopets

Edit: Here is the letter to the editor I sent in.

I was very disapointed in Time Magazine for printing the article "Pitching It To Kids." It was written by someone who either has no experience with the Neopets site and has not done their research properly, or someone who is purposefully trying to mislead and outrage readers. Let's look past the many mistakes and concentrate on the instances of misleading information.

" The company then tracks site activity and provides demographic and usage data to customers, offering a window into kids' purchasing habits."

The only information that Neopets should have on any user is their age and gender and perhaps their country or name if they volunteer that information. But a good parent would tell their child not to give out details like name and location. I can only assume that this sentence was intended to induce paranoia in parents of potential Neopets players, but I think that age and gender are pretty harmless as far as information goes.

Secondly, "At the Neopia food shop, for instance, Uh Oh Oreo cookies, Nestle SweeTarts and Laffy Taffy candy (along with unprocessed foods) have occasionally been available to buy with Neopoints to feed virtual pets." The author of this article makes it sound as if the food store is filled with brand name foods, but in actuality almost all of the virtual food on the site is non-brand name. No one is required to buy items with brand names, no one is required to play the sponsor games. There is a wide variety of games to choose from and very few are sponsored at all.

To illustrate that the author of this article has little or no experince with Neopets let me fill you in that 330 neopoints is not a lot, in fact I can make thousands of neopoints a day just from playing non-sponsor games. I'm not even good at the games.

Furthermore, there is a place that players can go to get their pets healed and cured from disese every half an hour. Even if a player completely neglects their neopet, without feeding it, playing with it, and leaving it sick, it will never die.

The author neglects to mention any good points about Neopets at all. Had he bothered to do any research he would have learned that Neopets is educational, teaching HTML, leadership skills, responsibility, economy, and the rewards of long term goals.

If Time magazine would like a non-biased, well researched, and well written article about neopets.com please do not hesitate to contact me. I am a published author, I have 39 months experience on Neopets, and I can assure you my article will be much better than "Pitching It To Kids."

[sailor_melody]

That whole article is really unfair. I'm going to write a letter too, they really have no business picking neo out like that. Besides, maybe if the parents disciplined their kids and didn't give in to their every request, advertising wouldn't matter.

Heh, sent the letter while typing this. I put in a bit of sarcasm, I wonder if anyone will catch it. ^_~

[everconfused]

I was thinking of writing a letter too. I know, alot of us have our issues and complaints about things going on on Neo, but we're for the most part still there. No, I wouldn't get into any of the things that we find wrong.

I would write basically saying that the article was biased, full of misinformation, lack of knowledge about the site in general and completely ignores the good that comes from playing Neopets. As Cat stated, learning responsibility, caring for our pets, the need for learning to work towards goals, saving, learning basic computer skills such as html and css, making friends without regard for race, creed, etc. - just accepting people as they are and having fun. And the article completely disregards the huge number of adults on the site who are there to enjoy themselves, relieve the day's stress and just get "lost" for a short time in a wonderful world.

As far as the 3.5 hours per month average usage, I really cannot understand where that number came from. Most people I know spend at least that much time per day on the site. And the 330 np being alot is simply absurd, unless you've only been on the site for a few days and haven't found your way around the site. And Neopets has a very nice tutorial for new players to help them find their way around.

If in fact Congress and/or the Senate is considering passing some sort of internet bill I believe they should be concentrating on spam, spyware and adware, not something as benign as immersive advertising. What's next? No advertising on TV because it will make children want their parents to buy them certain things?

[Sylence]

kinda neat!

[jellyoflight]

'Chirita' is a red flotsam.

The Neopian pharmacy sometimes stocks a cure, but it's pricey, costing about 330 Neopoints.

WOW. HOW INCREDIBLY PRICEY. IF WE ALL HAD 330 NEOPOINTS THEN WE'D BE MILLIONAIRES.

And hundredsofthousandsaires when you get 250np at the start!


You know, if neo didn't have games and people didn't have to earn their np, then kids would grow up thinking that money would be dolled out to them without any effort.

[vermilion]

I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not whether or not we think immersive advertising is annoying or not, it's whether or not immersive advertising is harmful to young children--along the lines of 5, 6, and 7--who can't tell the difference between advertising and fun.

That said, the article is just like most written about Neopets in that there's a lack of understanding about the site in general, and no attempt to get opinions from a broader group of Neopets users.

[Jens]

I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not whether or not we think immersive advertising is annoying or not, it's whether or not immersive advertising is harmful to young children--along the lines of 5, 6, and 7--who can't tell the difference between advertising and fun.

That said, the article is just like most written about Neopets in that there's a lack of understanding about the site in general, and no attempt to get opinions from a broader group of Neopets users.

maybe the writer got annoyed so much he kept losing against chia clown and didn't get anything from the tombola he simply wrote that article

[LoopyLauren]

WHAT!?!?!?! 3.5 hours a MONTH! My parents would wish. For me its more like 3.5 hours+ a DAY! LOL!

[Duke of Earl]

I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not whether or not we think immersive advertising is annoying or not, it's whether or not immersive advertising is harmful to young children--along the lines of 5, 6, and 7--who can't tell the difference between advertising and fun.

That said, the article is just like most written about Neopets in that there's a lack of understanding about the site in general, and no attempt to get opinions from a broader group of Neopets users.

Thank you...

Neopets is probably the site that got noticed because it is for little kids and it is probably the most successful site that uses immersive advertising. That would be why.

And if they're abusing Neopets, just remember, we abuse TNT unfairly as well... Neopets is not all good, it's keeping millions of people from burning calories and getting in shape... Course, so are TVs and computers in general *shrug*

[Jens]

I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not whether or not we think immersive advertising is annoying or not, it's whether or not immersive advertising is harmful to young children--along the lines of 5, 6, and 7--who can't tell the difference between advertising and fun.

That said, the article is just like most written about Neopets in that there's a lack of understanding about the site in general, and no attempt to get opinions from a broader group of Neopets users.

Thank you...

Neopets is probably the site that got noticed because it is for little kids and it is probably the most successful site that uses immersive advertising. That would be why.

And if they're abusing Neopets, just remember, we abuse TNT unfairly as well... Neopets is not all good, it's keeping millions of people from burning calories and getting in shape... Course, so are TVs and computers in general *shrug*

*images fat lady keeps playing spider solitaire all day*

if neopets got banned of being to addictive, so should PPT be! and MSN! And all other gaming sites! (arcadepod, jippii, games.telenet.be, ...)

[bgryph]

I think a lot of people are missing the point. It's not whether or not we think immersive advertising is annoying or not, it's whether or not immersive advertising is harmful to young children--along the lines of 5, 6, and 7--who can't tell the difference between advertising and fun.

Thank you. :-)

I should also point out that this wasn't meant to be an article all about Neopets. It was an article about kids and advertising, although it used Neopets as its main example. So naturally the bit they focused on were the ads. Why would you talk about the healing springs or how learning HTML for your petpage is educational in an article about advertising? It would be like filling the Battledome board with posts about the poetry contest -- totally off-topic, even though both the Battledome and the poerty contest are related to Neopets.

It's not just kids who are affected by immersive advertising, although kids are what the article focuses on. My understanding is that advertising is actually more effective when you're not really giving it your full attention -- because when you're not fully attending it, you're not on your guard against it. In a class I TAd last fall, the professor told us that TV ads are actually more influential when they're muted -- because you're not really paying attention to the ad, but you're still probably picking up the mention of the brand name on the screen. And simply seeing something mentioned over and over is typically enough to make people like it better.

So the reason some people think that immersive advertising is worse than normal adverts is twofold. One, they're worried that kids may not be able to pick up on the fact that it's an ad without clear divisions between "show" and "ads." I mean, sure, there's the little "this is an ad" on the bottom of the screen and that would be enough for us, but we're not 8. (Of course, most kids TV shows are just toy ads anyway. Although it doesn't talk about in this article, from other articles I've seen groups worried about ads and kids tend to be concerned about this as well.)

Two, as I mentioned above, there seems to be evidence that ads are more influential when you're looking at them without really attending to the advertising content. That describes sponser games to a T. When I'm playing the new Lucky Charms game, for example, Lucky Charms is floating around in front of me all the time. But although I naturally know it's an ad, I'm not really thinking about that fact while I play the game -- I'm too busy running from those dang kids. So my brain sits soaking up "Lucky Charms, Lucky Charms" while I'm distracted by the game in a way it wouldn't if I were focused on a more traditional ad (where I'd be thinking the whole time, "this is an ad so it's all probably bull anyway").

I totally agree that immersive advertising is less obtrusive and annoying than normal advertising. That's why it works better. :-)

I also agree that I don't think I've bought anything because of immersive advertising. If the advertising works really well, then you don't think you're buying it because of the advertising when you buy the product. :-)

The fact is, most of the stuff advertised on Neopets isn't to my taste. So while the ads may make me like the product better than I would have without the ads, they don't make me like it enough to buy it. It doesn't mean that the ads don't work -- or even that they're not working on me. They're still influencing me even if they're not influencing me enough to buy the product. I think anyone who thinks they're above being influenced by advertising is kidding themselves. Adverts are designed to play on basic human psychological principles. So if you have a human brain, they're influencing you. :-)

[hynfaeries0]

I never knew 330NP was a lot of NP.I earn about 5,000 a day just off of a couple flash games.I can earn more I'm just too lazy to.It is unfair that they targeted Neopets though.You could fill Time Magazine full of nothing but sites that have ads and still not have enough room I bet.Did they mention any other sites on it?

As I've said before, I will say again, 350 np is not alot. I agree