The total land area of OpenSim’s public grids jumped by more than 33,000 region equivalents this month, with the addition of a large new grid to our list. However, the total number of active users was down by nearly 1,500, due to several grids not reporting stats this month. Missing grids included Fire and Ice, The City, and Little Big City.
The big new grid was Simation Grid, with a reported 25,408 region equivalents. OpenSim’s architecture makes it easy for grid owners to launch with plenty of space. Or it could be a stats mistake — the grid’s website says “Standard Region Equivalents: 25408 Km2” — and if it is actually giving the area in square kilometers, than it has 387,693 total regions, which would make it larger than all the other OpenSim grids put together. I couldn’t find any contact information on the grid’s website, and some of the pages seem to be placeholders, so if you’re the owner of Simation Grid and are reading this, and if I got your numbers wrong — please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com and I’ll update this article!
We are now tracking a total of 2,675 public grids, of which 318 are active and 258 published their statistics this month. If you have a stats page that we’re not tracking, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com — 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 33,554 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,540 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: 6,540 active users
- OSgrid: 5,168 active users
- GBG World: 2,333 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,163 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,967 active users
- Vida Dupla: 1,838 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,718 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,521 active users
- Trianon World: 1,108 active users
- AviWorlds: 1,028 active users
- AviVerse AlterEgo: 987 active users
- Neverworld: 962 active users
- Littlefield: 935 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 840 active users
- AvatarLife: 837 active users
- Moonrose: 825 active users
- Astralia: 771 active users
- Craft World: 744 active users
- Herederos Grid: 582 active users
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 545 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 537 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 524 active users
- Groovy Verse: 522 active users
- Kitely: 462 active users
- Barefoot Dreamers: 438 active users
The biggest change on this list was the addition of Virtual Vista Metaverse, a new grid in our database, which had a strong launch.
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41,073 product variations, 35,835 of which are exportable.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 628 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.
Kitely has recently upgraded its version of OpenSim to allow for faster start-up times and better compatibility with scripts imported from Second Life.
New grids
The following grids were added to our database this month: Agartha, AmaziWorld, Casperia Prime, Gridworld, HG Safari Grid, Nosso Lar, Sciattisi Grid, Simation Grid, Steg, and Tenth Dimension.
If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
Suspended grids
The following nine grids were marked suspended this month: Eenhgrid, Hermopolis Chimera, Kantarobasta Grid, Kindred Spirits World, Pseudospace, Rocket World, Royal Grid, Starfleet, and Tropicana Grid.
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: 33,554 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 29,276 regions
- Simation Grid: 25,408 regions
- Kitely: 18,108 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 12,932 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 10,437 regions
- Groovy Verse: 8,201 regions
- Discovery Grid: 4,945 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,527 regions
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 3,260 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
- Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,040 regions
- GBG World: 957 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 915 regions
- ArtDestiny: 900 regions
- AviWorlds: 841 regions
- Craft World: 673 regions
- Kinky Haven: 669 regions
- AvatarLife: 594 regions
- Littlefield: 513 regions
- GorGrid: 430 regions
- Furry World: 373 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 364 regions
- Neverworld: 348 regions
- DreamNation: 308 regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
- EdMondo: 300 regions
- Insight Concepts: 240 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 229 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 218 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 188 regions
- Counter Earth: 186 regions
- Kater and Friends: 185 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 183 regions
- Adreans-World: 173 regions
- OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
- WestWorld Grid: 135 regions
- XTalent: 133 regions
- GerGrid: 132 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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.
