Update: I was missing the stats for GBG World because my database didn’t pick them up. (They’re in a non-standard format.) I’ve added them manually and updated the story. For an example of a great stats page, check out Baller Nation’s stats or Discovery Grid’s stats or Alternate Metaverse’s stats. The default Diva WiFi page from DreamGrid also works. The numbers I pull are the total registered users, total 30-day actives (including both local and hypergrid), and land area in standard region equivalents (or square meters). The less stuff on the page and the simpler the formatting, the easier it is to set up the scraping algorithm.
Due to an OSgrid user modeling all of North America, the total number of standard-sized regions in OpenSim is still an astronomical 973,193.
Land is land, and plenty of people put up regions in OpenSim that nobody ever uses because land is so cheap — even free, if you run them on your own computers — so on the one hand, I should count these.
On the other hand, it will make my bar chart absolutely impossible to read! So I’m leaving those regions out, and counting OSgrid as if it only had the 35,873 regions it did earlier this year, before the grand geography experiment, plus the 1,373 regions it added in the past month — for a total of 37,246 — instead of the 864,410 it’s reporting now.
Anyway, that particular weirdness aside, OpenSim’s commercial grids reported 12,308 more standard region equivalents this month, 366 fewer registered users, and 14 fewer active users.
Eleven grids were marked as suspended this month: Eenhgrid, Gabngio, Gridworld, KittyBlue, Lonetree, Moonlighting Grid, Nitro, Paradise City, SiLi, Six Sides, and VR-ESC. Some grids closed for good, including Canadian Grid.
By my count, OpenSim now has the equivalent of 159,922 standard region equivalents, 46,230 active users, and 491,935 registered users.
Our stats do not include most of the grids running on DreamGrid, a free easy-to-use version 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: 11,274 active users
- OSgrid: 4,258 active users
- GBG World: 2,606 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 2,303 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,032 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,542 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,535 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 1,502 active users
- Groovy Verse: 1,384 active users
- AvatarLife: 1,036 active users
- Neverworld: 916 active users
- Trianon World: 855 active users
- Craft World: 827 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 826 active users
- BloodMoon: 817 active users
- Littlefield: 787 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 786 active users
- AviWorlds: 782 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 548 active users
- SpaceGrid: 435 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 430 active users
- Kitely: 394 active users
- Herederos Grid: 386 active users
- Astralia: 384 active users
- Vivo Sim: 365 active users
Canadian Grid shuts down
Canadian Grid — not to be confused with the Great Canadian Grid, which is also closed — has shuttered its doors due to a lack of interest, grid owner Chris Strachan told Hypergrid Business.
Normally, when a grid shuts down, there are people worrying about how to transfer their regions, content, avatars, and scheduled events to their new grids — and I write an article about the migration.
That’s not the case here, since the grid had none of those things. Since we started tracking the grid a year ago, it had a maximum of 13 visitors a month, with one month where it just had three.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 21,137 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,907 product variations, 36,620 of which are sold with the Export permission, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 666 OpenSim grids to date.
The numbers are all up since the start of the year, and, as always, nearly all the 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. Many official freebie stores on OpenSim grids offer these products.
This is similar to how Netflix and other low-cost and free streaming surfaces 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.
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.
- OSgrid: 37,246 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 33,258 regions
- Kitely: 17,840 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 17,049 regions
- Groovy Verse: 14,979 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 11,180 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,405 regions
- Neverworld: 2,634 regions
- GBG World: 1,951 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,465 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,168 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,156 regions
- Sub-Version Space: 1,065 regions
- Craft World: 1,030 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
- AviWorlds: 812 regions
- Kinky Haven: 685 regions
- AvatarLife: 615 regions
- Exotic Realities: 603 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
- Littlefield: 533 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 423 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- EdMondo: 310 regions
- BloodMoon: 272 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- OliGrid: 214 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 213 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 199 regions
- Adreans-World: 170 regions
- Kater and Friends: 162 regions
- SpaceGrid: 157 regions
- Utopia Skye: 147 regions
- I Love You Grid: 147 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
- Logicamp: 133 regions
- Outworldz: 129 regions
Do you know of any other grids that are open to the public but that we don’t have in our database? Email me at [email protected].
