OpenSim usage stats down as summer comes to a close

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Summer is generally a slow time for OpenSim, and virtual worlds in general, as people spend more time outside and on vacation and educational projects go on break.

The total number of active users went down by more than 3,700, to 43,001.

DigiWorldz, for example, lost 1,220 actives this month, according to its stats reports, as well as 21 regions.

In addition, several grids did not report any stats this month, including German Grid, which had 235 actives last month, German World Grid, which previously reported 623, and The City, which reported 265 actives in July.

But the total land area of OpenSim’s public grids rose by nearly 1,494 region equivalents this month, and OpenSim grids registered a total of 1,545 new users.

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 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 33,203 standard region equivalents, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 6,733 unique logins over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for Aug 2024. (Hypergrid Business data.).

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.

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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:

  1. Wolf Territories Grid: 6,733 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,844 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,295 active users
  4. Vida Dupla: 1,987 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 1,885 active users
  6. Darkheart’s Playground: 1,723 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,447 active users
  8. AviWorlds: 1,068 active users
  9. AviVerse AlterEgo: 1,002 active users
  10. DigiWorldz: 943 active users
  11. Trianon World: 937 active users
  12. Neverworld: 897 active users
  13. Littlefield: 822 active users
  14. Party Destination Grid: 796 active users
  15. Moonrose: 774 active users
  16. Astralia: 763 active users
  17. Craft World: 723 active users
  18. AvatarLife: 717 active users
  19. Herederos Grid: 578 active users
  20. Groovy Verse: 547 active users
  21. Virtual Vista Metaverse: 494 active users
  22. ZetaWorlds: 476 active users
  23. Kitely: 460 active users
  24. Gentle Fire Grid: 448 active users
  25. DreamNation: 342 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.

(Data courtesy Kitely.)

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.

Kitely is also continuing its $90 sale on Mega Worlds.

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 maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following 11 grids were marked suspended this month: Butschiland, Butschiland, Destiny Grid, Fire and Ice Grid, Galactic Virtual, IMA Metaverse Depot, KoolPheller Estates, The Public World, Tropical Isle, UCI Mondego vLab, and Virtual RBM.

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.

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.

Maria Korolov
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