For those that are running massive sites - and/or content-rich sites that use Adsense and other advertising networks and you’re complaining on the various webmasters forums, then you have to remember, the holidays always have low earnings - because more advertisers are trying to push their shop sites, in order, to compete with the other affiliate sites that try to push merchandise to their consumers, but, as the holidays are coming to an end in a few days - we should expect our earnings to go back up, however; if you don’t notice an increase in your earnings, then you need to try to build your site back up - increase traffic, add more content and try to build links with relevant sites.
So, if your earnings have been sucking throughout December - how much of a decrease was it? Did your earnings drop 50%?
The new Powerpets is now up- with a brand new design and all of the old servers now redirect to the main domain of Powerpets.com - with new layout, brings many changes..
Here are some of the comments posted by their users:
I wish I could give a thumbs up, but I’m really disappointed with the new membership thing. I would WAY rather have ads than have to pay for something that we used to be able to get. I don’t know how appealing this will be to me anymore. I love you guys for giving me a great 3 years on the site, but some of these changes are not something I’m happy with. Hopefully I’ll be able to adjust, but I know that I spent SO much time on the discussion board reading over everyone’s ideas, and now I can’t do that. :/
The site looks nice and I can really understand why you did things the way you did them. I guess just after five years here I’m a little disappointed in the membership. I really won’t be able to afford that per month to continue accessing the boards I did before and fear I’ll lose a lot of the friends I have here because of it. I sort of feel like I’ve been told that the few credits I was able to buy to access what was important to me just wasn’t good enough.
While I like most of the changes, I do have a probem with the membership charges. I had already paid in for over 3 months on the Poco21 board and for the animated avatars, but now I’m going to have to pay in 50 credits for access for a month? That doesn’t seem fair to me. I might be willing to pay a little more for access, but going from 3 credits a month for Poco21 to 50 is excessive to say the least.
Superb graphics, looks great. 
Good work. What I really don’t understand is this, though: ‘Members Only Server Access - The ultimate benefit. Members are allowed to log into members only servers. These servers have limited access and are expanded as more members join up. Your access is faster than it is on the Public Servers.’ — So, if you are a person that can’t donate $5 a month (or $60 annually), you must stay on the public server. And not the member server, which is faster. Does this affect restocking? For me, restocking is what has kept me on PP so long and kept me dedicated. Sounds like members have an advantage over nonmembers at making pbs, since they’ll be on the faster server, thus having a quicker restock time, thus making more pbs, which doesn’t sound very fair. However, I might be misanalyzing it - hope I’m wrong 
Those are just 4 comments posted by their users - and if you’d like to read more, then check out their latest post announcing the new Powerpets which can be located at their Small updates.
So, the question remains - do you guys like the new Powerpets or do you hate it? Tell us why.
If you guys haven’t noticed yet, Marapets has been ranking for the “games” keyword for quite some time now on google. We wonder how many new users a day Marapets receives from such a powerful keyword, however, they’ve been ranking for about 4 months now ever since they launched their massive advertising campaign. Who would of thought a virtual pet site in our niche would rank so high on the search engines - but without given it much though, the powerful SEO on Marapets can be seen by its wide variety of opened game pages to spiders & guests. They currently have over 100,000+ indexed pages on Google - and will continue to rise as their users continue to promote the game to their friends (via blogs & forum links).
So, what happens when a pet site in our niche ranks for games? Well, lots of members and continued domination of the niche, of course, and if anyone wants to surpass Marapets for the games ranking, then you better have some money to spend - on promotion. We don’t know how Marapets did it, but if you have any tips, or advice, on how Marapets did it, then please do share your knowledge with us - as we’re as clueless as you are when it comes down to this great keyword that Marapets ranks for.
On a side note: How much traffic do you think Marapets is receiving from the “games” keyword? 50,000 daily uniques? 100,000 daily uniques? More? Let us know!