Traffic up, land area drops this month

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The total land area of the public OpenSim grids fell by 16,771 region equivalents after Virtual Worlds Grid took down its variable-sized regions, but the total number of active users rose by 1,374 to 33,574 this month. Without the Virtual Worlds Grid statistics, OpenSim would have gained a net of 1,589 regions.

The grid’s owner, Myron Curtis, is currently recovering from being put in a medically-induced coma for a couple of weeks.

“I am getting better for more quickly than anyone would have expected, but I am still very weak,” he told Hypergrid Business.

But he took down the excess regions for another reason, he said.

“I was overloading my servers,” he said. “OpenSim has become such a resource hog that I may have to either find a way to clean it up, or completely rethink my strategy.”

OpenSim now has 54,786 standard region equivalents and a record high of 513,398 registered users.

Closed grids lost a net 737 regions and 1,957 active users this month, in part because Island Oasis, formerly a closed grid, enabled hypergrid connectivity. To clarify, individual closed grids did not lose that many regions and active users, but those regions and users were recategorized this month as being on the hypergrid.

The biggest gainer was OSgrid, with 1,359 new region equivalents, followed by Kitely with 354 new regions, Atek Grid with 201 new regions, AviWorlds with 155 new regions, Grid Nirvana with 115 new regions, and A Life Virtual with 108 new regions. All are hypergrid-enabled.

 

Standard region equivalents on OpenSim's public worlds.
Standard region equivalents on OpenSim’s public worlds.

In our statistics, The Adult Grid had 213 additional regions this month, because it provided Hypergrid Business with the total square land area of its grid. Normally, and on its stats page, this grid only reports the number of named regions. Reporting only the number of named regions, however, can make a grid look significantly smaller than it is. For example, a grid that used to have 100 standard regions that converts them all to a single varregion will suddenly look as if it shrank — even if the total land area and content remains the same. Many grids have recently been converting standard regions and megaregions to varregions for better server efficiency, and we have switched to reporting land area in terms of “standard region equivalents” as a result.

For those who are new readers, OpenSim is a free, open source virtual world platform that’s compatible with the Oculus Rift. It allows people with no technical skills to quickly and cheaply create virtual worlds, and then teleport to other virtual worlds. Those with technical skills can run OpenSim worlds on their own servers for free, while commercial hosting starts at less than $5 a region — compared to $300 a region for the same land in Second Life.

A list of hosting providers is here. Download the recommended Firestorm viewer here. And find out where to get content for your OpenSim world or region here.

Popularity

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.

The biggest gainer this month was The Great Canadian Grid, with 287 new actives, followed by DigiWorldz with 207, Craft with 174, and then Kitely and Lost Paradise, both of which gained 156 new active users.

In other Kitely news, the company’s Kitely Market now has 12,190 different item listings, 63 percent of which are exportable to other grids.

Linda Kellie’s new grid, Clutterfly World, continued its growth streak with 170 new active users for a new high of 488 actives.

Here are the top ten most popular grids:

Transitions

We have 23 new grids added to our database since this time last month, including Shadow of Your Mind, Emilac, PaderGrid, CyberNexus VW Grid, Virtual Life EU, Paradise World, The Boggy Swamp, Regno Di Camlaan, Adventure Bay, Mundo Virtual Brasil, Digital Multiverse, Watcher’s World, Servex Grid, Icelady Grid, Calypso 3D, Enoch, Binders World, Américas Worlds, Emerging Mind Project, Yaras Welt, OpenSim UAb, C4 OpenSimulator, and Tenebris Mysterium.

The following 43 grids were marked as suspended this month: 4Play, Adrianopolis, Aries, Astraliacraft, BOS OpenSim, Cacao Grid, Deep Horizons Research Institute, DogeWorld, Dune, Four Ages, GEA, German Grid, Gianella, Gorean Grid, Herkimer’s Lab, Hogwarts, Jilmer Estates, MagicalSim, MS Axiom, My Damn Grid, Next Reality, Oz, Play Grid BR, ProgramLama, Psychedelia, Quokka, Realms in Time, Red Oasis, Resonant, RippersMetaverse, SimGrid, SkyLife, SLFDGrid, SPBs-Welt, Stagma World, Tertiary Grid, The Island, ThunderLife, Tom World HG, Utherworldz, VALENCIA_UVEG_LAND, YouClouds, ZomboLand.

Grids that have been suspended for more than two months will be marked as closed. If your grid isn’t on the active grids list, and not on the suspended list, and is marked closed when it shouldn’t be, please let us know.

And 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.

By “public,” we mean grids that allow hypergrid visitors, or have a website where people can register for or request accounts.

February 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 1,143 different publicly-accessible grids, 299 of which were active this month, and 228 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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