In an article on Gamasutra Neopetsannouncing that MTV and Nexon are partnering to promote Maple Story, Kart Rider, and Audition, it was also revealed that this partnership will also result in Neopets (which thus far has not taken money from users, preferring to garner 100% of revenue from ads), will begin selling virtual items to its users.

This is big news. Neopets, while not a virtual world, is an online games community that has a larger reach than any of the big three Western virtual worlds: World of Warcraft, Habbo Hotel, and Runescape. For what it’s worth, its Alexa ranking is 150 vs. 566 for WoW (lower is better) and 821 for Runescape. Habbo Hotel is split across multiple websites, so there’s no number to compare there. (Take those numbers with a big grain of salt. Alexa is not horribly reliable except as a general indicator of website traffic. People have to access Runescape and Neopets via the website, but not WoW.) However you stack it up though, Neopets is absolutely massive, and it’s pretty big news in the virtual asset sales department to see them adding this model onto their existing model.