It’s really funny seeing everybody here talk about how Neopets taught them HTML/introduced them to coding, and all I can think about was how it taught me about “immersive advertising”!
Unless Extreme Potato Counter was sponsored by Big Potato...
Did a cursory search so take all this with a grain of salt, but looking at the timeline of when ads are introduced, then the acquisition, peak users, etc. I’d say most people were playing in a pretty serious corporate sandbox for most of its most relevant years.