Due to an OSgrid user modeling all of North America, the total number of standard-sized regions in OpenSim is still an astronomical 986,683. I guess OSgrid still hasn’t figured out what to do about all these testing regions.
Land is land, and plenty of people put up regions in OpenSim that nobody ever uses because land is so cheap — even free, if you run them on your own computers — so on the one hand, I should count these.
On the other hand, it will make my bar chart absolutely impossible to read! So I’m leaving those regions out, and subtracting out the additional regions. I don’t have an exact number for these, so I’m using an estimate of 825,435, based on subtracting OSgrid’s size before this grand experiment. It’s a rough estimate, but it lets us continue to compare month-to–month growth in OpenSim.
Anyway, that particular weirdness aside, OpenSim’s commercial grids reported 1,326 more standard region equivalents this month, 925 more registered users, and 913 fewer active users.
The following 11 grids were suspended this month: Canadian Grid, Dark Heaven, Fearless Mysteries, Jaytopia, Kishaki, La Grilla de Don Javi, Metaverse Concept, New Horizon, Omnopolis, Virtual Life Brasil, and XTalent.
By my count, with the OSgrid adjustment, OpenSim now has the equivalent of 161,248 standard region equivalents, 45,317 active users, and 492,860 registered users.
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.
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: 11,534 active users
- OSgrid: 4,022 active users
- GBG World: 2,543 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 2,255 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,010 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,524 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,469 active users
- Groovy Verse: 1,432 active users
- AvatarLife: 1,007 active users
- Neverworld: 953 active users
- BloodMoon: 855 active users
- Trianon World: 796 active users
- Craft World: 781 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 750 active users
- AviWorlds: 729 active users
- Sciattisi Grid: 711 active users
- Sanctum Astra: 671 active users
- Littlefield: 653 active users
- Gentle Fire Grid: 469 active users
- Kitely: 457 active users
- SpaceGrid: 449 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 445 active users
- Vivo Sim: 391 active users
- Astralia: 356 active users
- Eureka World: 344 active users
Online marketplaces for OpenSim content
There are currently 21,141 product listings in Kitely Market, containing 41,957 product variations, 36,679 of which are sold with the Export permission, according to Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner.
Kitely Market has delivered orders to 670 OpenSim grids to date.
The numbers are all up since the start of the year, and, as always, nearly all the growth has been in exportable content. This means that buyers can have their purchases delivered directly to avatar inventories on other grids, and that they can travel to other grids with the content.
In the early days of OpenSim, many creators considered this to be a security risk, and non-exportable content dominated. But creators quickly realized that most copybotted content actually comes from Second Life, where everything is non-exportable. And, in general, copybot tools and content thieves don’t bother to check item permissions before committing their thefts. Instead, allowing people to purchase exported content legally, conveniently, and at reasonable prices destroys the copybot economy entirely, leaving only a handful of freebie stores on grids that haven’t yet noticed that they exist and taken them down.
Another source of legitimate content on OpenSim is Linda Kellie’s products, and those of other creators that give them away for free under Creative Commons and similar licenses. Many official freebie stores on OpenSim grids offer these products.
This is similar to how Netflix and other low-cost and free streaming services dramatically reduced online movie piracy.
The Kitely Market is the largest collection of commercial 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.
OSCC goes off without a hitch
I did a presentation about OpenSim statistics at the OpenSimulator Community Conference on Saturday, Dec. 7, and hosted a panel about AI in OpenSim on Sunday, Dec. 7.
The conference was, as usual, fantastic and the organizers managed everything smoothly and ran it on schedule, despite a lot of craziness on my end!
Videos of the individual sessions will be posted soon, but meanwhile, you can watch a replay of the entire Saturday livestream here and the entire Sunday livestream here.
Here’s a direct link to where my Saturday presentation starts and here’s a direct link to where my Sunday AI panel starts.
And yes, that’s pretty much what I look like in real life, except for the fact that I don’t — yet! — own a green jacket. I’ve recently started posting more videos on my personal AI channel, mostly about AI, so you can see me in real life if you want. If you do go over there and watch my videos, I strongly suggest you watch the videos to the end, making copious notes about everything I got wrong, and then leave detailed comments. I will be answering people’s questions in follow-up videos!
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: 864,105 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 33,394 regions
- Kitely: 17,827 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 17,054 regions
- Groovy Verse: 14,817 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 11,196 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,370 regions
- Neverworld: 2,597 regions
- GBG World: 1,951 regions
- Discovery Grid: 1,614 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,465 regions
- Friends Grid: 1,168 regions
- ArtDestiny: 1,156 regions
- Sub-Version Space: 1,065 regions
- Craft World: 1,038 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 910 regions
- AviWorlds: 800 regions
- Kinky Haven: 701 regions
- AvatarLife: 630 regions
- Exotic Realities: 603 regions
- Virtual Worlds Zone: 558 regions
- Littlefield: 534 regions
- Darkheart’s Playground: 422 regions
- Furry World: 358 regions
- EdMondo: 310 regions
- BloodMoon: 308 regions
- Migrating Coconuts: 247 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 218 regions
- OliGrid: 214 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 201 regions
- Virtual Vista Metaverse: 199 regions
- Adreans-World: 170 regions
- Kater and Friends: 163 regions
- SpaceGrid: 157 regions
- Utopia Skye: 150 regions
- I Love You Grid: 148 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
- Logicamp: 136 regions
- Outworldz: 130 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].
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