The original developers sold it to Viacom in 2005, then it was sold again in 2014 to Knowledge Adventure’s JumpStart division.
Viacom broke a lot of the promises that the original developers made, concerning keeping the playing field level for free users, most of them children.
The original developers felt very strongly about not offering any premium content that would give those that pay, an unfair advantage over those that don’t, because most kids don’t have credit cards or parents that would allow them free use of theirs to buy premium content.
Viacom didn’t care about that and seemed more interested in making money in any way they could, and that included offering perks to paying members that made it unfair to free players. This really upset a lot of users, who then left the site.
Combine that with the heavy censorship Viacom employed on user generated content in Shops, Guilds and on Pet pages, and a bunch more left the site for less restrictive environments to express themselves. (you couldn’t post something as innocent as “sushi tastes good” because the letters S, H, I, and T would appear consecutively, and any attempt to circumvent that would get you banned and your account locked, causing you to lose everything, including premium content. And Viacom would not consider restoring your account, under any circumstances, even if your circumvention was to post something as innocent as my example.)
Viacom focused more on Premium content and bombarding free users with an overdose of banner advertising, rather than new content and the more subtle product placement and submersive advertising (product themed games) that the original developers were well known for. This made for a rather unpleasant environment for free players of the game, bordering on a real-life version of Advert Attack, and complete stagnation of the site.
It also became notorious for predators, scamming kids in all sorts of ways, resulting in stolen accounts, exposure to adult content, malware infections, identity theft, and the like. Not really a safe place for kids that parents could feel good about, any more.
It’s a real shame, too, because that site was fantastic at sparking a love and desire to learn web development and design, in many young people, and once offered a great kid friendly playground for them to get started learning HTML and CSS, and share what they learned with each other.
It also offered a child friendly experience, mimicking the rest of the internet that their parents were using. It had its own internal e-mail system, auctions similar to Ebay where kids could auction off their unwanted virtual items, semi-private forums very similar to blogs and Facebook groups, shops where they could buy & sell virtual items for Neopoints, etc. For many kids, this was practice for the future they would face as adults on the much larger internet, with internet shopping, running an e-commerce business, understanding concepts such as supply and demand and how it affects pricing, marketing concepts, managing an online community, running their own website, and many other activities.