The total land area on OpenSim’s public grids reached the equivalent of 138,831 standard regions this month, an all-time high — and the fourth month in a row that OpenSim land area has broken this record. That’s an increase of more than 5,000 regions since last month.
The biggest gainer in terms of land area was OSgrid, which gained 2,655 new regions, taking the top slot back from Wolf Territories Grid.
At the same time, the number of active users hit 47,620, another record, and an increase of more than 2,000 actives compared to the previous month. Here, Wolf Territories maintained its leadership position after gaining 307 new active users.
Meanwhile, the total number of locally registered users in OpenSim went up by more than 2,000, led by AvatarLife with 521 new registrations.
I’m now tracking a total of 2,657 public grids, of which 313 were active, and 247 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.
The following grids were added to our database this month: Nordlicht Grid and Royal Grid.
Also, I’m no longer sending out a monthly email blast reminding OpenSim grid owners to send me news and updates for this report. If you have news, please email me before the tenth of the month if you want a short item included in this monthly wrap-up. For longer news, feel free to send me press releases at any time.
Our stats do not include many of the grids running on DreamGrid which is a distribution of 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: 5,578 active users
- OSgrid: 5,250 active users
- DigiWorldz: 2,168 active users
- GBG World: 2,112 active users
- Alternate Metaverse: 1,996 active users
- Darkheart’s Playground: 1,680 active users
- WaterSplash: 1,384 active users
- Moonrose: 1,202 active users
- AvatarLife: 1,133 active users
- Trianon World: 1,088 active users
- Vida Dupla: 1,062 active users
- Neverworld: 1,011 active users
- Littlefield: 996 active users
- AviWorlds: 987 active users
- Party Destination Grid: 861 active users
- Craft World: 780 active users
- Astralia: 703 active users
- Eureka World: 654 active users
- Virtualife: 636 active users
- Kitely: 612 active users
- Herederos Grid: 600 active users
- Resurgence: 590 active users
- Friends Grid: 583 active users
- German World Grid: 567 active users
- ZetaWorlds: 547 active users
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: 29,800 regions
- Wolf Territories Grid: 28,544 regions
- Kitely: 18,151 regions
- ZetaWorlds: 11,748 regions
- Alternate Metaverse: 10,208 regions
- Groovy Verse: 8,121 regions
- Discovery Grid: 5,178 regions
- DigiWorldz: 3,572 regions
- German World Grid: 2,476 regions
- CandM World: 1,595 regions
- Tag Grid: 1,464 regions
- Shoalwater Bay: 1,072 regions
- GBG World: 953 regions
- Virtual Worlds Grid: 916 regions
- 3rd Rock Grid: 872 regions
- AviWorlds: 859 regions
- Friends Grid: 816 regions
- ArtDestiny: 784 regions
- Kinky Haven: 669 regions
- AvatarLife: 589 regions
- Littlefield: 516 regions
- GorGrid: 430 regions
- Tomi’s World: 400 regions
- Craft World: 390 regions
- Furry World: 373 regions
- DreamNation: 318 regions
- Nemesis 3D: 305 regions
- EdMondo: 300 regions
- Neverworld: 291 regions
- Open Virtual Worlds: 241 regions
- Kater and Friends: 187 regions
- Counter Earth: 187 regions
- Japan Open Grid: 184 regions
- Adreans-World: 173 regions
- MisFitz Grid: 172 regions
- WestWorld Grid: 149 regions
- GerGrid: 141 regions
- OpenSim Fest: 140 regions
- Outworldz: 127 regions
- Galactic Virtual: 127 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.
