We’ve been averaging well the past few days .

Since posting this, it has attracted the attention of the Lurapets staff, which I’m not ashamed of. However, I’d like to warn anyone who is going to take the time to read the comments to just read the first few comments, because that’s generally how the entire thread goes.

To those of you coming from other sites, or from the Lurapets staff, I urge you to please be cautious because you’re not just responding to me, you’re responding in a capacity that all of your members can be. Choose your words wisely.

A couple of months ago, specifically July, I had the thought to write a post about Lurapets, and the similarities to Subeta. I’m no stranger to other sites ideas, and incorporating them into my own site. For example, recently we took an incredibly popular feature of Twitter (the @username) function, and incorporated it into our forums, and called it “pinging”. It alerts you when you’ve been called to a thread.

This is an example of taking an idea, and building on it. Making it your own. Another example is the ‘Human Avatar’ feature, that is similar to the avatar function on Gaia. We saw the potential to change Pet Sites forever (to our credit, it has. Find a virtual pet site without an avatar dress up game now ) and tried to find ways to build on it. You can layer, we make extensive uses of ‘hexes’, and other modifications to the general idea that have carried onto the entire industry.

We use ideas (and I have no problem saying so) and we build on them, making them our own. We make sure that they aren’t blatant rip-offs that just scream to have a blog post like this written about them.

Now, I told myself that it wasn’t worth it to write the Lurapets post. There are currently 33 people online on Lurapets, compared to the 655 on Subeta. I’m not concerned about Lurapets being competition, because frankly, it’s not. I don’t expect Lurapets to be competition anytime in the future, because their entire business plan is copying everything that Subeta does so we will always be one foot ahead of them. Rather, we will always be miles ahead of them.

Here are just some examples of things that I noticed are Lurapets that feel… familiar.

Monthly Collectables

The first image is of the news post for the September 2009 Collections, which are a monthly present filled with a selection of 10 items. The second image is of Lurapets adding a September Collectible (at the end of September, no less!) which appears to contain 11 items.

To be fair, we just started doing the 10 item collections at the start of this year, in January. Prior to that, we had a 15 item ‘donation present’ that contained 15 items and you got one at random.

Three Birds, One Stone

I’m going to knock a few things out with just this one image, which is handy. First, and foremost, Subeta was the first site to incorporated the ‘hover’ feature for items. This has been a feature for years, though recently we updated it to use AJAX and call the data as you hover over to save the page from loading hundreds of item data on page-load. Older browsers tend to not like that.

Another important thing to recognize from this post is the costume trunk idea. I can’t claim that Subeta was the first thing to ever have a costume trunk, because that’d be incorrect. However, we were the first site with human avatars to incorporate this into a cash shop. That mermaid trunk seems familiar… Oh wait, that’s right!

And finally, the last issue with this screen shot is the cash shop.

Magical Pet Collar (which increases your pet slots) and the Premium Star Plushie. Now, I’ve never had a problem with “gold accounts” or “diamond accounts” or “premium accounts”, or anything like that. Subeta was the first site in our industry with that functionality, but it’s fairly common and has been a staple of the internet since it started. However, that in combination with the rest of the items in this cash shop (including the magical pet collar) which are all essentially copied from the Subeta Cash Shop is what makes it pretty obvious what is going on here. Another thing is the ability to have your own custom item, but in that respect I actually feel poorly for the Lurapets team because it’s something is very difficult to pull off (We’d know, we’ve tried it… twice )

In Conclusion

All of this post, the things mentioned, have for the most part been posted today on Lurapets, with the exception of the Premium Accounts and the Magical Pet Collar. What that means is that they are still not done copying Subeta. They are still not content with being a ripoff and have to continue pushing themselves into that corner.

I challenge any member of Lurapets to post a piece of original content on Lurapets, that cannot be found on another site.

Beyond all of that, I hope that I won’t have to be writing about Lurapets again. That means that, Ken, if my friends start getting Deviantart messages again (as I see that you’ve started to send them out again!) I will call you out. And it won’t be on virtualpetlist, I will call you out so that your members see it. That is seriously dirty and something that not only hurts your reputation, but your sites reputation, and all of the people that work for you. Last time you did this, I remember your staff spending a lot of time sticking up for the site itself, that they’d invested a lot of time, energy, and value as far as art is concerned, into. I hope you are more respectful to the community this time around.

K, I’m not really done.

One more little bit. I’m not against competition, or there being more sites in the virtual pet community. I welcome it. That’s why I haven’t said anything about Lurapets up until this point. I’ve been secretly praying that they’ll maybe branch off and start coming up with things original to their site. That’s why I rarely discuss or comment on other virtual pet sites, because it’s not my place. I run my site, and I’m incredibly fortunate to be doing that and be so successful at it.

The reason I am posting this is because I’ve seen Lurapets keep stealing from my site from day one. This is content that we have worked hard on for years to develop, and have hired and paid staff to help create. The majority of this isn’t something that we stole from someone else, or spent a day throwing together. This is an ongoing issue and something that I take personal offense to. I could have put together forty more examples if I had the time or patience to browse Lurapets.
If you’re a member, I suggest you read this thread at SubetaDrama. If you aren’t a member, I suggest you sign up .

XOXO
Keith Kurson

(Please excuse any grammar/spelling errors, not only is it not my forté but it’s 1:30AM)

d project to get you started with programing, look at some neat art, etc. Now, how do you find artists? You look around for people who are not already working for other pet sites.

Does this sound familiar? If you talk to me personally, it’s because it’s been kind of a running joke for the past few months. This pet site owner (Ken) runs a site called Lurapets. Ken has been sending out thousands of messages on DA for months, asking people to work for his site. He doesn’t look at their gallery (and see, hey, this person works for another site) and if he does get attacked for it, he posts a poorly spelled apology and promises to never do it again. Until a few weeks later.

Here are a few screenshots of how Ken. I told myself I would drop this last apology, but when he literally sends a message to my head artist, who has hundreds of official Subeta pieces in her gallery, it’s just… sad. Also, it looks like he might be low on cash.

For those of you who are Subetadrama members, you can find the months of lulz here.

lul

Here are the stats for December, for Subeta. It’s a little off, since we had a little bit of downtime in the past week due to high traffic. Here are what I would like the stats to be, by June 2009.

Views

All Visits: 3,500,00
New Visitors: 400,000
Returning Visitors: 2,500,000
Pageviews

All Visits: 250,000,000
New Visitors: 15,000,000
Returning Visitors: 200,000,000

Pages/Visit

All Visits: 300
New Visitors: 100
Returning Visitors: 200

Bounce Rate

Overall I’d like it to be less than 10%

Average time on site

I’d like it to be at least 45 minutes. Need to add features that are compelling and keep users entertained for long periods of time.

New Visits

I’d like to increase our advertising and get a large amount of new incomming users through the starting months of 2009.

Goal Completion

To complete these goals, I need to ramp up an advertising campaign that isn’t just adwords, or even advertising on sites that are similar to Subeta. I need to start making friends in the industry and start working with like minded young people in advertising our companies together.

Also, another major push will be getting Subeta more involved with Valenth — and increasing the amount of advertising used for Subeta on Valenth.

Increasing the amount of programmers that we have will be a requirement, and I hope to have applications open near the opening of 2009 with basic questions that any programmer should be able to answer. We are going to be looking for the talented pool of Subeta users because they know the site, and what the users want.

The achievement system is huge in keeping users on the site. I hope to add at least 20 new achievements a week to keep people on their toes, and running around the site working on completeing the collection.

Also, I plan to increase the social networking features on Subeta — allowing users to interact with other users. Major changes to the forums, and internal mailing system should be completed by June, including the reputation system. Also making it easier for users to communicate via profile comments, and maybe even an on-site messenger system.

Another thing will be integrating outside social networks into Subeta. I plan to have a facebook application ready to go by June 2009 at the latest, as well as integrating facebook into Subeta for importing friends, and finding out which of your friends have a facebook profile.

There are a lot of things that we can do to continue growing, and I hope that 2009 is a great year for Subeta and it’s users :]

So I told the admin in question that I couldn’t advertise on Subeta because that’d be in the same ‘market’ (pet sites) but instead I could op for an adoptable on Valenth which would be just as good (if not better) for traffic.

I wasn’t given any information about the site and the changes that would be made while it was down, just that it was being ‘reset’ (all the user accounts were being removed) and that it’d be a ‘new site’ when it was brought online.

Now, I’m very pleased that the valenth adoptable was never discussed past that point, because when creatureworld came back online, it seemed very familiar. The wardrobe feature in particular (which is layed out similarly to Subeta’s) as well as multiple other smaller things (for example, the same CSS used in user hovers, save changing the colors) around the site itself.

I understand rebranding, the old Creatureworld wasn’t working. Subeta is the second most popular virtual pet site on the internet. I understand that flattery is the sincerest form of flattery. However, when you ask for my help, knowing in the back of your mind that you’ll be bringing the site back online with obviously cloned features – that’s wrong.

I hope you enjoy your place at the bottom of the food chain, Creatureworld. This is the only advertising you’ll be getting from me.

So, I think I know which gender I’m more popular with…

Now – I’m wondering if I should extend the Subeta ad platform to my other sites. For example, would Subeta users be more keen to purchasing ads if they knew that they’d be displayed on Valenth as well? Also, I wonder how much more work I’d have to do in the platform to make it be ’succesful’ on Valenth and other sites that get enough traffic to warrent it.

The problem is people who link to their Subeta content (ie: shops, trades, personal posts, journals, etc) and people on the other sites (omgimages, valenth, etc) aren’t aware of Subeta, and probably won’t click on those ads. The benefit to that would be getting them TO click on the ads, and explore Subeta. Which really only benefits me, and not those users.

Also, allowing users on those sites to purchase ads would get them to Subeta, since that is where the platform would be…

I’m not sure – it’s all interesting, though.

The Pet Site industry is a dying animal (see what I did there?!) that is comprised of small sites and a few large sites that have a way of destroying themselves from the inside out. I’m going to go through the major players, and some of the smaller sites, and then analyze the industry as a whole.

Neopets – The big cat, the leader of the pack. This site has eaten so many others, and was purchased by Viacom in the past few years for a small 160 Million. While some might think that is a huge number, I think that it was completely undervauled, and Viacom contuniues to show how undervauled they consider this property with bad choices, and bad direction.

Marapets – Always very clear in it’s business approach. Put up as many ads as possible, steal as much content from other sites as possible, and profit. I’m fairly sure that there is a myspace blog screenshot (tacky!) floating around somewhere of Ian saying how Marapets has made him rich, he’ll never have to have a real job, etc, etc.

Subeta – I’m biased. I own Subeta – and I try to operate it to the best of my ability. I feel that Subeta has the best art direction, and some of the best user support staff on any site. While the past year has been plagued by server issues, lack of new content, false promises, and other problems; we are working hard to turn things around and move in the right direction. First pet site to have gold accounts, and a cash shop. Others quickly followed suite when it was discovered that you could make money from other methods than ads (which we are one of the few sites that operate without advertisements )

So, how do these three sites stack up?

Well, neopets is clearly the big dog here. Lets go ahead and take them out, and see how it looks.

Both sites, while competetive, have the same problem. They’re heading down. Now, both sites have had chronic server problems, so that could be it. Or maybe the entire industry is heading downwards?

The other smaller sites aren’t in the top 100,000 so Alexa doesn’t track their progress. So I couldn’t get a good idea of how those sites are doing, who is going up, who is going down, etc. I will continue to look into that.

Now, the point of this post was to bring to attention that the entire Pet Site business needs something to shake it up. While at Subeta we are working on ideas and making progress in changing things up, every site needs try and do things differently. If everyone keeps copying each other, it’ll continue in this vicious cycle until we are all feeling the pain.