I know we haven’t done one of these in a while, but I’ll be doing a presentation on OpenSim — and on AI — at this year’s OpenSim Community Conference, so we’ll need some recent stats!
The big news is that OSgrid reported the equivalent of 864,868 standard region equivalents this month — normally, its land area is around 35,000 regions. If it still had 35,000 regions, the total OpenSim land area this month would have been 142,108 — still an impressive number, but not 971,976!
And even with the smaller number, OSgrid would still be the largest grid by land area.
According to OSgrid president Dan Banner, the regions are from someone working on a continental project.
“They were trying to map out North America,” Banner told Hypergrid Business. “I will check with them and see what’s valid or not and clean up if not.”
For the land area chart below, I’m using the 35,000-region land area number for OSgrid, not the 800,000-region land area.
In other OSgrid news, the grid is celebrating its 18th anniversary this year, and there will be an annual fundraiser with an auction next week.
In other OpenSim stats news, total number of registered users went up by more than 2,000 compared to this past January, when I last ran the stats, while the total number of active users went down by a little over 3,000. The reason is probably because I only have 241 active grids on my list right now, down from 300 in January.
There have probably been a ton of new grids added over the past few months that I’m missing, and a bunch that changed their loginURLs or domain names, or who moved their stats page — grids who should be showing up in the stats but aren’t.
If you’re one of those grids, email me at [email protected].
I am now tracking a total of 2,582 public grids, of which 241 were active this month, and 191 published their statistics.
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.
Hypergrid Business content update
As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve scaled back on Hypergrid Business these last couple of years, mostly due to being super busy with AI coverage at my day job. But then someone offered to buy the site from me. And, in an attempt to get the best possible price for it, I looked up its latest traffic and performance stats. Keeping in mind that these are at a time when I’m barely updating it.
- According to Google Analytics, there were 11,129 pageviews over the last 30 days, with 5,119 unique visitors.
- Over the past year, there were 157K views by 66,041 unique visitors.
- From 2009 to 2023, monthly traffic went from 5,000 pageviews to over 100,000, over 200,000, and, one month, hit 346,981.
- The total number of views over that period was 8.7 million. During the first half of 2023, page views hovered between 29K and 39K a month.
So if we have more content on the site, pageviews would probably go back up. Most of the people would be coming for the VR and AR articles, sure, but, in the process, they might learn something about OpenSim.
But then I found a few more positive indicators. Our Google Search Console shows that Goolge is still showing Hypergrid Business links to millions of people, it’s still listed as a Google News source and it’s included in Google Discover.
Also, a few other nice indicators:
What could someone do with a site like this, with all of its history and domain credibility? Well, they could use it as a launch pad for up-to-date content about VR and AI.
And, since the readers are tech-friendly — in fact, OpenSim readers don’t mind being on the raw, bleeding edges of technology! — they probably wouldn’t mind too much if AI was used to help research and create the content, as long as a real human was overseeing the whole process closely.
In fact, someone recently contacted me with a job doing just that, editing a mostly-AI-generated newsletter about AI.
So that’s an option. I could sell it to someone looking to do something like that.
Or I could keep the site and do something interesting.
For example, I’m very curious about how AI will affect content creators. These are people who create images, text, virtual environments, games — and communities! How will AI affect what they’re doing? What new opportunities will they have — and what will be taken over by automation?
As someone who’s been writing for a living all her adult life, this is a deeply personal question to me.
So I think I’ll be using Hypergrid Business to start exploring it. Maybe I’ll set up some automations to pull in the stats, say, so that these reports take less time to do. Or maybe I’ll pull in information from OpenSimWorld, grid calendars, and social media feeds and do weekly summaries of the top goings-on on the hypergrid. Or maybe grid owners and organizers can use AI to help them generate regular stories about what’s happening in their communities.
There are a lot of possibilities here. I’m looking forward to doing some exploring.
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: 10,860 active users
- OSgrid: 4,265 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 2,399 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,095 active users
- GBG World: 2,051 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,650 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,570 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 1,408 active users
- Groovy Verse: 1,374 active users
- Trianon World: 936 active users
- AvatarLife: 928 active users
- Neverworld: 926 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 913 active users
- AviWorlds: 875 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 802 active users
- Littlefield: 800 active users
- Craft World: 582 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 576 active users
- BloodMoon: 536 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 525 active users
- SpaceGrid: 399 active users
- Kitely: 395 active users
- Herederos Grid: 383 active users
- Astralia: 380 active users
- Jungle Friends Grid: 356 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
I don’t currently have the latest Kitely Market stats because I forgot to email Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner and ask for them.
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
The following grids were added to our database this month: Nitro, Wild Grid, and WoodstockSim.
If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at [email protected].
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: 864,868 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 33,253 regions
- Kitely: 17,840 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 17,018 regions
- Groovy Verse: 14,097 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,494 regions
- Neverworld: 2,620 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,465 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,184 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,089 regions
- Craft World: 969 regions
- GBG World: 955 regions
- AviWorlds: 737 regions
- Kinky Haven: 685 regions
- AvatarLife: 600 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
- Littlefield: 533 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 410 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- EdMondo: 309 regions
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 262 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- BloodMoon: 226 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 217 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
- Counter Earth: 179 regions
- Kater and Friends: 166 regions
- Adreans-World: 164 regions
- SpaceGrid: 160 regions
- Utopia Skye: 150 regions
- XTalent: 149 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
- I Love You Grid: 140 regions
- WestWorld Grid: 137 regions
- Outworldz: 134 regions
- Arcadia Asylum: 134 regions
- Logicamp: 133 regions
- Jungle Friends Grid: 124 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].
