OpenSim’s land area and active users both increased this week, despite the fact that a couple of large grids didn’t report stats.
The public metaverse gained the equivalent of 591 standard-sized regions this month, and 1,275 active users for a total of 149,536 regions and 48,376 actives.
The total number of registered users went down, by about 15,000, mostly due to the fact that EdMondo — an educational grid that had over 10,000 registered users last month — was down. In addition, Logicamp, which had over 7,000 registered users last month, did not report any user numbers this month.
The following grids were added to our database this month: Andretti Estates, Arcgel, Beyond Infinity, Dark Angel Grid, Devhalla, DowCraft, Funny Rides, Hawaiian Dreams Grid, Life RPG World, LuxeLife Virtual, Neocorex, Obfuse Chill Grid, Rad3DSims, Second Sanctuary, Shork Group Grid, Stress Free Grid, The Originals, The Water’s Edge, TinyOne, and Wiccagrid.
The following 13 grids were marked as suspended this month: AI Grid, DowGrid, Dust, Dyvall, FurrySide, Ipsofacto, Kyle Archipelago, New Genres Grid, SFgrid, Sublimit Metaverse, Virtual Learning Village, Virtual Vista Metaverse, and Willow Lake.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free, easy-to-use version of OpenSim, since these tend to be private grids.
OpenSim is a free, open-source virtual world platform that’s similar to Second Life and allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds and teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their servers for free using either DreamGrid, the official OpenSim installer for those who are more technically inclined, or any other distribution, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region.
A list of OpenSim hosting providers is here. If you offer region rentals and are not on this list, email me!
You can download the recommended Firestorm viewer here and find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.
Hypergrid Business newsletter is now available
Every month on the 15th — right after the stats report comes out — we will be sending out a newsletter with all the OpenSim news from the previous month. You can subscribe here or fill out the form below.
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Top 25 grids by active users
When it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is the busier the better. People looking to make new friends look for grids that already have the most users. Merchants looking to sell content will go to the grids with the most potential customers. Event organizers looking for the biggest audience — you get the idea.
Top 25 most popular grids this month:
Wolf Territories Grid: 12,526 active users
OSgrid: 4,420 active users
GBG World: 2,401 active users
Alternate Metaverse: 2,097 active users
DigiWorldz: 1,885 active users
Darkheart’s Playground: 1,509 active users
Groovy Verse: 1,342 active users
Cave Grid: 1,303 active users
Sciattisi Grid: 1,088 active users
Neverworld: 989 active users
New Life Italy: 905 active users
Trianon World: 883 active users
Sanctum Astra: 828 active users
AvatarLife: 809 active users
BloodMoon: 789 active users
Party Destination Grid: 736 active users
AviWorlds: 726 active users
Craft World: 672 active users
Littlefield: 603 active users
Friends Grid: 568 active users
SpaceGrid: 499 active users
Eureka World: 462 active users
Virtualife: 440 active users
ZetaWorlds: 427 active users
Endless Grid: 413 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
As of May, there are 21,960 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 42,792 product variations, of which 37,485 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 679 OpenSim grids to date.
Historically, all the Kitely Market growth has been in exportable content. This means that buyers can have their purchases delivered directly to avatar inventories on other grids, and that they can travel to other grids with the content.
In the early days of OpenSim, many creators considered this to be a security risk, and non-exportable content dominated. But creators quickly realized that most copybotted content actually comes from Second Life, where everything is non-exportable. And, in general, copybot tools and content thieves don’t bother to check item permissions before committing their thefts. Instead, allowing people to purchase exported content legally, conveniently, and at reasonable prices destroys the copybot economy entirely, leaving only a handful of freebie stores on grids that haven’t yet noticed that they exist and taken them down.
Another source of legitimate content on OpenSim is Linda Kellie’s products, and those of other creators that give them away for free under Creative Commons and similar licenses. Many official freebie stores on OpenSim grids offer these products.
This is similar to how Netflix and other low-cost and free streaming services dramatically reduced online movie piracy.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of commercial legal content available in OpenSim. It is accessible to both hypergrid-enabled and closed, private grids. The instructions for how to configure the Kitely Market for closed grids are here.
Top 40 grids by land area
All region counts on this list are, whenever available, in terms of standard region equivalents. Active user counts include hypergrid visitors whenever possible.
There were a total of 312 active grids this month, 236 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,136 grids.
Many school, company, or personal grids do not publish their numbers.
The raw data for this month’s report is here. A list of all active grids is here. And here is a list of all the hypergrid-enabled grids and their hypergrid addresses, sorted by popularity. This is very useful if you are creating a hyperport.
You can see all the historical OpenSim statistics here, including polls and surveys, dating all the way back to 2009.
Wolf Territories Grid: 33,811 regions
OSgrid: 24,261 regions
Kitely: 17,720 regions
ZetaWorlds: 16,938 regions
Groovy Verse: 15,226 regions
Alternate Metaverse: 11,768 regions
Neverworld: 2,805 regions
DigiWorldz: 2,471 regions
GBG World: 1,926 regions
Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
Tag Grid: 1,561 regions
Friends Grid: 1,497 regions
Sub-Version Space: 1,065 regions
ArtDestiny: 961 regions
Craft World: 944 regions
Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
Exotic Realities: 758 regions
Kinky Haven: 689 regions
AviWorlds: 643 regions
AvatarLife: 638 regions
New Life Italy: 636 regions
Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
Littlefield: 466 regions
Darkheart’s Playground: 422 regions
Furry World: 358 regions
BloodMoon: 316 regions
Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
OliGrid: 214 regions
MisFitz Grid: 209 regions
Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
Spartans Keep: 192 regions
Sense Limits: 185 regions
Adreans-World: 171 regions
I Love You Grid: 170 regions
Kater and Friends: 169 regions
Maze of The Mind: 166 regions
Seconds: 159 regions
Nitro: 143 regions
Logicamp: 139 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that I don’t have in my database? Email me at [email protected].
