Atek biggest land gainer this month

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All OpenSim stats increased this month but the most dramatic increase was on Atek Grid, which more than quadrupled its land area this month with nearly 400 new regions.

There are now a total of 56,011 standard region equivalents on the 217 public OpenSim grids that released their stats, 418,293 registered users, and 23,934 active users. That is a gain of more than 1,000 regions, more than 5,600 registered users, and nearly 700 new active users.

Land area on OpenSim's public grids in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Land area on OpenSim’s public grids in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)

As mentioned above, Atek grid was the biggest land gainer, with 376 new regions, bringing the total regions on the grid to 472. This is an excellent showing for a new grid. Atek is an open grid, meaning that users can connect regions for free. It is sponsored by CloudServe, a low-cost OpenSim hosting company.

Atek is hypergrid-enabled, as were the other five big gainers this month — Metropolis, with 333 new regions, Kitely with 138, Next Reality with 110, SirinHGpole with 96 and 3rd Rock Grid with 88.

In fact, 92 percent of all OpenSim regions – 50,801 — are on hypergrid-enabled grids, with just 3,876 regions on closed grids.

Hypergrid-enabled grids also continued to gain active users this month at the expense of the closed grids.

Active users on closed grids and hypergrid-enabled grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)
Active users on closed grids and hypergrid-enabled grids. (Hypergrid Business data.)

Last month was the first time since InWorldz began reporting its active user statistics that the hypergrid had more active users than closed grids.

Popularity

For company and school grids, relative popularity is not an issue — the grids are set up for a specific purpose, and if they meet that purpose, then they are successful. The same is true for grids run by niche communities or that serve a special need not met elsewhere.

But when it comes to general-purpose social grids, especially closed grids, the rule of thumb is: the bigger and 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.

With that in mind, here are the ten most popular grids this month:

InWorldz was the biggest gainer, with 219 new actives, followed by Next Reality with 179, Metropolis with 155, the new open WestWorld Grid with 138, the great Canadian Grid with 120, Craft with 108, Virtual Live Brazil with 75 and 3rd Rock Grid with 62 new active users.

WestWorld was launched late last month, a free-to-connect open grid sponsored by Tangle Grid. WestWorld is competing directly against Atek Grid for users.

Avination, a closed commercial grid competing directly with InWorldz, was the biggest loser, with 159 fewer actives this month than last month. Island Oasis, another closed commercial grid, lost 82 active users.

Grid News

I’ve had a lot of Internet problems this past week and will be running the grid news updates separately. If I don’t post yours, please resend it to me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com. I will not be posting individual music events, however, since there are just too many of them.

Transitions

We have 29 new grids added to our database since this time last month, including Fantasy World, AquaFox World, Creative Citizen Grid, Naseby Village, Freedomland, DigiSoul, Snow Matrix, Virtual Dream, Hypergridder, My Educational Community, Western Springs, Auth, Mirage, RippersMetaverse, Hiro’s PC, Shadowy Tales, Justice Grid, Al Grid, HDD VR, Chezeworld, Fantasy World, Dream Forest, Wer ist Wo, North-March, Dreamscape, Open Community Grid, Avi-Labs, 14 Virtual, and The Reef.

And the following 19 grids have been marked as suspended: AnjWorld, BunnehGrid, Calbertville, Contepomi, Exnixia, Heavens Gates, Hippy Grid, Home of Xerdar, Langalf’s Demesne, LifeStyle 3D, Peter’s World, PierSimConnect, R.World, Rescue Grid, SecondLearning, SRPSIM, The Gyre, University of the Aegean, and Virtual Gay Kingdom.

If there’s a public grid we’re not tracking, please email us at editor@hypergridbusiness.com. There’s no centralized way to find OpenSim grids, so if you don’t tell us about it, and Google doesn’t alert us, we won’t know about it.

There were a total of 1,583 new downloads of the OpenSim software this month, bringing the total downloads to over 216,000. However, the counter on the official OpenSimulator.org site was down. The Diva Distro had 511 new downloads, New World Studio had 18, and Sim-on-a-Stick saw the most new downloads this month at 1,054.

January Region Counts on the Top 40 Grids

The list below is a small subset of existing OpenSim grids. We are now tracking a total of over 943 different publicly-accessible grids, 259 of which were active this month, and 217 of which published their statistics.

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.

Maria Korolov
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