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.
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].
