WebKinz

Starting Out

Girl Thing

I had been hearing one of the guys at work talk about his girls playing with WebKinz. I considered it a "girl thing" and just sort of ignored it. A few months later, I noticed the boys on some Disney website. They were dressing up bunny rabbits and decorating a "room". I decided that if they were going to put time into it, it may as well be the real thing - rather than a cheap knock-off version. The next day I stopped and got a cow and an elephant and our WebKinz addiction was born.

KinzCash

Seemingly within moments, they were out of the local currency (KinzCash) and wanting more. Although, as the site tells you all over, the quickest way to get $KC is to play Quizzy Trivia, it's also the most like school-work (and therefore largely avoided by kids and adults alike).

I have, over time, developed a DiceKinz set that will earn me a pretty decent income. However, DiceKinz requires a little research and income to build a good set. It requires a decent understanding of the strategies involved to play it. And it takes a bit of time. So, it doesn't really lend itself to something the kids can do. Although, as I say, I can throw an hour or two at it now and then and rake in a little $KC.

Generally, working at the "Employment Office" will make you money. The challenge is, as you successfully complete the same job over and over, it ramps up the difficulty. At Level 3, the only two things I can do first thing in the morning (when I normally do my "WebKinz run") is Flooring Assistant or Hamburger Cook jobs. I'm lucky to remember to do it once a day - so I only make about 200 $KC a day on that.

I did a little web-searching and discovered folks saying that there was money in gardening ...

Gardening

Where to Begin?

I started off just playing at it. Then I decided, with all the varieties of stuff to plant, it might be good to figure out what grew the fastest and supplied the best "bang for the buck" (as far as monetary investment, time spent tending the thing, etc).

"Scientific" Method

After keeping a log for a couple months (and discovering that -- no matter how diligent you are at weeding and watering -- you're going to get whole crops that are "out of synch" with each other), I finally just threw all the numbers together and came up with this:

Crop	Grow Time	Avg Harvest	Fill Value	Sell Value	Avg PPD	Avg KCPD	Tot Picked	Tot Plants
Pumpkin	7 days	1.00	3	10	0.14	1.43
Watermelon	7 days	1.00	4	10	0.14	1.43
Corn	10 days	2.71	3	7	0.27	1.90	168	62
Strawberry	10 days	2.80	1	7	0.28	1.96	84	30
Tomato	12 days	2.34	3	6	0.20	1.17	75	32
Carrot	8 days	1.88	4	7	0.23	1.64	75	40
Cabbage	9 days	1.37	4	8	0.17	1.37	41	30

In summary, you get more "value" out of your produce by selling it and buying cheap food than you will by just consuming the "fruits of your labor". Also, in general (over the long-haul) corn and strawberries tend to make you the most $KC/day .. with carrots coming in third.

I hate weeds!

Shortly after arriving at the above conclusions, my garden (which I had been trying desparately to keep all carrots harvesting on the same day -- as well as corn all one day -- etc) got so out-of-synch that I stopped watering and weeding it altogether.

I happened to check on it a couple days later -- thinking it would be grown over with weeds -- and there were several things ready to be harvested!

Later, I discovered that you can (actually) let something go long enough that it will turn a dry-looking brown/tan. At that point you can only dig it up and re-start the growing cycle. (The good news, however, is that you don't have to re-buy the seeds.)

For now, I knock out the weeds -- generally once a day -- and harvest whatever happens to be ready. You can see from the pictures that my garden has grown in size a bit. It usually takes me about 5-10 minutes to weed/harvest in the morning. I immediately sell off whatever I've picked. I haven't really tracked it lately but I'm guessing that I'm bringing in about 80-100 $KC per day. Not enough to make you rich, but enough that it does (slowly) add up over time.

Spring

In March, I checked the garden one day and EVERYTHING was weeds! I thought "What the heck?!?" When I tried to weed it, I got an "error" message ..

Apparently this is some kind of seasonal "reset" .. A day or two later there was a note about it being Spring and it said something about the garden being ready. I checked and, suddenly, every single plant was ready to be picked! Payday! :)

Conclusions

You can make a little money off of gardening in WebKinz but you could probably make money faster with a decent set of DiceKinz .. both take a good bit of cash to start up (although a garden is way cheaper in that respect) .. but you're not going to "break the bank" by any means.

Innovation or Imitation?

NeoPets

After playing with WebKinz for a while, I started looking at some of the other options to see what's out there. We bought a couple Shining Stars and looked over the demos for Kookeys and Ty 2.0 .. Each of us now have NeoPets accounts and I snooped around the virtual version of Disney World for a little bit.

From our experience, WebKinz pretty much has the formula for 5-10 year olds figured out -- maybe even up to pre-teens. The rest of them seem to be missing some little bit that makes them addictive enough to come back to day-after-day.

NeoPets appears to be the ones that started all this virtual-pet stuff. The challenge there is that it's really geared more towards teens to adults - and not to youngsters the age of my kids. Don't get me wrong, they get on NeoPets and play a few games .. but their pets are currently "Starving!" cuz they haven't been visited or played with in a couple weeks. NeoPets has a lot more things to do -- and some *way* more fun games (at least for us wanna-be gamblers) .. but WebKinz has a flashy, straight-forward presentation that's efficient and easily-digestable. That's a formula that, obviously, several other groups are trying to compete with ..