This time of year — in the northern hemisphere, at least — people start spending more time inside as temperatures drop and school starts.
So it’s no surprise that the total number of active users on the public OpenSim grids is going up.
According to their published stats report, there were 44,129 actives this up, up by 1,128 from this time a month ago.
However, the total land area went down, by the equivalent of 738 standard regions. All of that drop — and then some — is accounted for by the fact that a single grid, CandM World, didn’t report its stats this month. Last month, it had over 1,800 regions. Today, the website just shows a security error message, so it could just be a configuration error.
We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 311 are active and 244 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at [email protected] — that way, your grid will be mentioned in this report every month, for additional visibility with both search engines and users.
This month, OSgrid was the largest grid by land area, with 34,103 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,950 unique logins over the past 30 days.
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. 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: 6,950 active users
- OSgrid: 4,894 active users
- GBG World: 2,422 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,143 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 2,018 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,789 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,491 active users
- AviWorlds: 1,101 active users
- AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,024 active users
- Trianon World: 1,004 active users
- Neverworld: 953 active users
- Moonrose: 861 active users
- Littlefield: 858 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 792 active users
- Craft World: 790 active users
- Astralia: 717 active users
- AvatarLife: 638 active users
- Herederos Grid: 566 active users
- Groovy Verse: 564 active users
- SunEden Resort: 552 active users
- Great Canadian Grid: 550 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 496 active users
- Kitely: 495 active users
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 456 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 437 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 21,019 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,133 product variations, 35,892 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 630 OpenSim grids to date.
As you can see in the above chart, nearly all the growth in Kitely Market has been in content that can be exported to other grids — that is the green area on the graph. The red area, of non-exportable content, has stayed level for the past eight years.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of 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.
New grids
I didn’t add any new grids to the database this month.
If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at [email protected].
Suspended grids
The following 12 grids were suspended this month: BachmansWorld One, CatGrid, DigiGrids, German Grid, Legacy, Mathesis, Matrix, NewOffworld, Oczko, SFgrid, Steg, and Trinity’s DreamGrid/
If they don’t reappear online again soon, they will be marked as closed in future reports.
Sometimes, a grid changes its login URI or website address — if that’s the case, email me and let me know and I’ll update my database.
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: 34,103 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 29,277 regions
- Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
- Kitely: 18,320 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 13,010 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 10,605 regions
- Groovy Verse: 8,380 regions
- Discovery Grid: 4,919 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,526 regions
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,284 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
- Shoalwater Bay: 1,088 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
- ArtDestiny: 961 regions
- GBG World: 960 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 914 regions
- AviWorlds: 839 regions
- Craft World: 688 regions
- Kinky Haven: 677 regions
- AvatarLife: 587 regions
- Littlefield: 513 regions
- GorGrid: 428 regions
- Furry World: 373 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
- Neverworld: 332 regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
- EdMondo: 300 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 276 regions
- WestWorld Grid: 270 regions
- DreamNation: 264 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 206 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 196 regions
- Kater and Friends: 193 regions
- Counter Earth: 190 regions
- Adreans-World: 170 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
- XTalent: 140 regions
- Outworldz: 132 regions
- Arcadia Asylum: 123 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].
