How did two students in Nottingham build Neopets?
Adam Powell, a British student at the University of Nottingham, had the idea for a virtual pet site in 1997. He and Donna Williams started building it in September 1999, with Powell writing the code and the database and Williams handling the art and the web design. Neopets went live on November 15, 1999.
The loop was simple enough for a child to understand in a minute. Adopt a pet, feed it, play browser minigames to earn Neopoints, then spend those Neopoints in shops run by other players. Everything else grew out of that: an auction house, a stock market, user-run shops, and pet pages that players styled themselves in raw HTML.
Growth outran the two of them inside a year. The operation moved to Glendale, California, and Doug Dohring, a marketing executive who had bought into the site, became chief executive and turned a student project into a company. By the time it sold in 2005, Neopets had registered roughly 25 million users, most of them teenagers or younger. For a site with no marketing budget, built by people who had expected to fund it with banner ads, that was an absurd result.
What was immersive advertising, and why did it stop?
Doug Dohring introduced immersive advertising in April 2000 and trademarked the phrase. Instead of banners around the edge of the page, brands were built into the world itself. Cereal characters turned up inside minigames. Sponsored areas were added to the map. The advertising was the content, and kids played it on purpose.
The model made Neopets profitable years before anyone said native advertising, and it made the site a subject of alarm. Sociologists questioned what it did to children who could not reliably tell a game from a commercial, and the press treated Neopia as a preview of where the whole web was heading.
Viacom's MTV Networks bought Neopets, Inc. in June 2005 for about $160 million, adding it to a youth lineup that already held Nickelodeon and MTV. Under Viacom the site leaned harder on conventional banner advertising and less on the immersive model that had defined it. That is the hinge of the story. The revenue got easier to sell and the world got noisier to sit in, and regulars noticed. The rest of the web was moving anyway: Facebook, YouTube and then the iPhone pulled the same teenagers in other directions.
Why did Neopets fall apart under JumpStart and NetDragon?
Viacom sold Neopets to JumpStart Games in 2014 for an undisclosed price, nine years after paying $160 million for it. JumpStart made educational software for small children and had little use for a teen community site running on aging code.
Players remember the JumpStart years as neglect. New content slowed to a trickle, bugs went unfixed, and the technical debt compounded. NetDragon Websoft, a Chinese game company, bought JumpStart in 2017, and Neopets came along with it as a line item in a deal about educational technology.
Then came the breach. Attackers were inside Neopets systems from January 2021 to July 2022 and left with the database and the source code. The exposed records covered roughly 69 million accounts and included names, email addresses, dates of birth, IP addresses and hashed passwords. A hacker offered the whole set for four bitcoin. For a site whose users had signed up as children, it was the worst possible failure at the worst possible moment, and it landed while nobody in charge was really paying attention.
What did the death of Flash take away?
Most of what people actually did on Neopets was Flash. The minigames that paid out Neopoints, the animations, the interactive corners of the map: hundreds of pieces of the site were Flash files. When Adobe retired Flash Player at the end of 2020, those pieces went dark together.
The team had seen it coming and had started converting games to HTML5, but the work was slow and the staff was small. Most of the game room stopped loading. The Neopian economy took the hit with it, because the games were where Neopoints came from. Players who had logged in for fifteen years found that the specific thing they logged in for no longer ran.
The fix arrived late and from an unexpected direction. In July 2023 the team installed Ruffle, an open-source emulator that plays Flash content in a modern browser, on the game pages, and more than 100 classic minigames came back. Neopets is one of the bigger sites to have solved its Flash problem by emulating the format instead of rebuilding every file by hand.
Who owns Neopets today?
World of Neopia, Inc. owns Neopets. The company was formed in July 2023, when Dominic Law, who had been running NetDragon's Neopets division, led a management buyout that pulled the brand out of NetDragon and made it independent for the first time since 2005.
Law's team announced the buyout and cancelled the company's crypto project in the same week. "Free from the corporate baggage that existed in the past," the announcement said, the Neopets team now held decision-making and brand strategy itself. In the July 2023 press release naming him chief executive, Law said he was "thrilled to help Neopets realize its fullest potential by putting the focus back on building and growing."
What he inherited was not pretty. The site had been running at a loss for about a decade, on infrastructure nobody had modernized, with a community that had watched three owners in a row treat it as a legacy asset rather than a product.
What does Neopets look like in 2026?
Neopets passed 400,000 monthly active users in February 2025, roughly triple its total a year earlier. "For the first time in a decade, we're seeing meaningful growth in our player base," Dominic Law said when the company reported the figure. Most of the money now comes from selling virtual currency rather than from advertising, which is the reverse of how the site worked in 2005.
Licensing is back too. Upper Deck launched a Neopets Battledome trading card game in 2024 and has kept shipping sets through 2026, and a Neopets character turned up in Fortnite in July 2026. Those deals matter more than they sound, because licensing revenue is how a studio of this size pays for server work.
Neopets has also outlived most of its category. Club Penguin is closed, and Habbo Hotel runs in a far smaller form than it once did. The site is still free, still runs in a browser, and still looks like a 1999 website that has been patched for 27 years, which is a large part of why anyone stayed. The active community skews adult, people who played as kids and came back. Whether Neopets can recruit new eleven-year-olds is the open question, and nobody has shown that it can yet.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Neopets still online in 2026?
Yes. Neopets is still online and free to play at neopets.com in 2026, and it is owned by World of Neopia, Inc., the independent company created by a management buyout in July 2023. The site has been running continuously since it launched on November 15, 1999.
How many people play Neopets now?
Neopets reported more than 400,000 monthly active users in February 2025, about three times its total a year earlier. That is a small fraction of the roughly 25 million registered users Neopets had when Viacom bought the site for about $160 million in June 2005.
Did Neopets ever do NFTs?
Yes. Under NetDragon's ownership, Neopets announced a blockchain metaverse project in 2021 and sold thousands of Solana NFTs before players objected. The new management cancelled the NFT project in July 2023, in the same announcement that made Neopets an independent company again.