TOSO, stop posting exactly what I'm thinking. It's really annoying that I had to edit out a long bit of my post (and some of it's still a bit redundant, alas) because you posted it first, my dear braintwin.
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Let me preface this with my traditional disclaimer for these threads: if you think this place is too quiet/inactive/negative/smiley-intensive and want to change that, threads like this rarely have any effect on that. The thing to do is to post your own threads, contribute to discussions, yada yada yadda.
Okay, enough of that. I have graphs! And statistics!
shapu wrote:
But back to another person's post: is Neo membership really sliding that quickly?
Virtual Worlds News says
Neopets gained 8.6 million users last year. That's a reasonably large number, but Neopets has averaged over 18 million accounts per year over the past 9 years. Dunno where VWN got their numbers, but they say Neopets has 53 million users now, which is way down from what it once was. I wouldn't be shocked if the userbase were still shrinking, though I think most of the shrinkage occurred a few years ago.
Neopets pageviews over time:
PPT pageviews over time:
Neopets and PPT traffic ranks over time:
What I take from that is that our pageviews are far more tied to plots and Northern Hemisphere school breaks than Neopets pageview stats. (Neopets doesn't seem to get much of a plot bump at all. Given how high theirs are to begin with, that's not all that surprising. Still, when they do plots, it's for the benefit of the few hardcore players who are really into it. Infer what you will about them based on the frequency/quality/very existence of plots.)