It’s hot here, at least in the northern hemisphere, and I would have expected people to stay inside, in the air conditioning, and be online more. Instead, OpenSim stats were down this month, both for regions and for active users.
Even total registered users — a number that usually only goes up — went down this month, but that was because a big grid didn’t report its stats.
The public metaverse lost the equivalent of 240 standard-sized regions this month, and 2,65 active users. There are now a total of 153,618 regions and 47,425 actives.
The total number of registered users went down by 39,179, to 452,232. Most of that drop can be attributed to the fact that the educational grid Eureka World, which had 39,000 registered users at last count, did not publish its stats this month. Or moved its stats page so that we can no longer find it.
Only one new grid, OpenWorld, was added to our database this month.
The following 10 grids were suspended this month: DowCraft, Eczeat, Eenhgrid, Ghost Area, Kara Islands Estate, Linkwater, Napoli Pulcinella, Paralax Life, SkyeLand, and The E Grid.
If these grids do not come back online within the next month or two, I’ll mark them as closed.
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.
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: 13,381 active users
- OSgrid: 3,907 active users
- Groovy Verse: 3,639 active users
- GBG World: 2,622 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,959 active users
- DigiWorldz: 1,862 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,425 active users
- Neverworld: 1,195 active users
- New Life Italy: 1,128 active users
- Cave Grid: 1,056 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 955 active users
- Trianon World: 878 active users
- AvatarLife: 756 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 725 active users
- AviWorlds: 696 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 679 active users
- BloodMoon: 621 active users
- Craft World: 605 active users
- Friends Grid: 585 active users
- SpaceGrid: 509 active users
- Funny Rides: 438 active users
- Virtualife: 366 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 364 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 310 active users
- Astralia: 302 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
As of May, there are 21,927 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 42,761 product variations, of which 37,477 are exportable, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
The total number of listings is down slightly for the second month is a row.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 692 OpenSim grids to date, a slight increase from last month.
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.
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.
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 329 active grids this month, 241 of which published statistics. I’m currently tracking a total of 2,151 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: 34,063 regions
- OSgrid: 25,665 regions
- Groovy Verse: 18,180 regions
- Kitely: 17,611 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 17,115 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 11,794 regions
- Neverworld: 3,346 regions
- DigiWorldz: 2,552 regions
- GBG World: 1,930 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,577 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,497 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,225 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
- Craft World: 875 regions
- Exotic Realities: 776 regions
- Kinky Haven: 689 regions
- AviWorlds: 652 regions
- New Life Italy: 635 regions
- AvatarLife: 621 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 562 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 426 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- EdMondo: 310 regions
- BloodMoon: 304 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- Spartans Keep: 218 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 214 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
- Funny Rides: 196 regions
- Maze of The Mind: 192 regions
- Sense Limits: 185 regions
- Kater and Friends: 181 regions
- I Love You Grid: 176 regions
- Dynamic Worldz: 170 regions
- Adreans-World: 165 regions
- Twiztid Timez Grid: 159 regions
- Logicamp: 142 regions
- Utopia Skye: 137 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].
