Palace peak because of Korn?

[CookieS]

So I was reading an article about The Palace on Wikipedia, and it credits the rock band Korn as the main reason for The Palace's huge spike in users.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pal...ter_program%29

Now I remember the Korn palace vividly, but I also recall that it was never #1. I think the Welcome Palace, South Park, and a few others held higher attendance at all hours of the day. Anyone been around long enough to dispute this?

[maarten]

Wikipedia does have one problem: whomever wants to brag / advertise himself just goes on wikipedia and edits the text to say whatever they want.

It is true the korn Palace was pretty popular, but mostly within its own crowd. Not a lot of people went from korn into the general Palace population and on average Avatar Palace had more visitors then Korn.

I think saying the korn crowd brought with them the end off Palace is more accurate. Outside of the Korn Palace they where not the most social people lol.

[MoonShine]

Mansion or old main had the most people on it--then welcome

[maarten]

Yeah main had the most people, thats what I remember too. Never really went to welcome for more the a few seconds, but I do remember it was always busy when i got there. Korn was busy at certain times, but I think even firebirdz was busier lol...

Firebirdz.. that was a cool place.

[dmehus]

Lots of things contributed to The Palace's success. In my own opinion, making client registration codes free by Electric Communities (later renamed Communites.com) to everyone greatly expanded its reach and was probably the single biggest factor in its success. It would've continued, if not for the unfortunate drying up of the online advertising market in late 2000 and early 2001 during what was the "dot-com crash". Communities.com also brought in new users, and revenue, from custom Palace server building partnerships with leading brands like CBS, MXG.com, Red Herring, Sweet16.com and, yes, KoRn. The Palace, Inc., (its predecessor owner) did this as well, with numerous partnerships including Intel's Boardwalk (renamed The Welcome Palace), South Park, and others.

Cheers,
Doug

[maarten]

Most old timers would argue the death of Palace started when the registration codes became free. People no longer had a real identity and could just do whatever they wanted and get a new registration code whenever they messed things up.

It did kill off the sense of purpose and feeling you had to really want to be there and most of the Palace users that helped build the community left.

The real problem was off course that they spend 29 million dollars to develope a chat with no real income model or server side security. Suffering from to many political games, to may kids using the cool features to wage wars on others and vent frustration. We had no plugins at the time and it was easy to mess up an entire Palace.

Still I guess the first years of Palace magic where strong enough to bind some of us for life

[Errant]

Korn came at the end, IMO. That's when they all started wearing the skater av's and talking their skater talk. They were a different crowd from the rest of us.

[maarten]

Good points, maybe Korn raised the Palace profile in popular culture but like you said it did come at the end. As Moonshine said, it was Main and Welcome mostly. But still not enought users to sustain a profitable community.

They spend 29 million $ on getting the palace of the ground, how can anyone make the investment back with a couple hundred users.

Just remembered a funny detail: for a while there was a spanish speaking palace that had over 500 to 600 instant Palace users every night.

[Drake]

I edited my post because it was not very sympathetic.
And Maarten is cool...

But i think that is a little strange to do an article on wikipedia with nothing about communities.com.

[Errant]

I remember the Spanish palace, maarten! I accidently wandered in there one night to see why it had so many users. They all seemed to be bumping into each other and not saying much. It was kinda creepy :o