OpenSim activity up with the new year

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All the OpenSim stats were up this month, as both land area, active users, and registered users all increased compared to mid-December 2024.

The land area of the public OpenSim grids went up more than 100 standard region equivalents, active users were up by more than 600 — and the grids reported over 4,100 new registrations.

Active user are the total number of unique visitors to a grid, both local and hypergrid. Registered users are people who have signed up for accounts on a grid, and is usually a positive sign of people’s commitment to a grid — and an early indication of future land rentals.

The numbers were up even though some grids didn’t publish their stats this month, including Moonrose, which had more than 900 actives in October. In addition, the OpenSimulator Community Conference grid lost nearly 300 actives because the grid hosted an annual conference the month before, and that traffic is now gone.

I am now tracking a total of 2,670 public grids, of which 300 were active this month and 246 published their statistics. 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 35,873 standard region equivalents, with a gain of more than 250 new regions, while Wolf Territories Grid was the most active, with 7,932 unique visitors over the past 30 days.

OpenSim land area for January, 2025. (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.

Discovery Grid leaves OpenSim for new virtual world platform

Discovery Grid is still in the process of shutting down, but a few people are still visiting the grid, probably as part of getting all their stuff migrated.

You can read more about it here.

Hypergrid Business now on BlueSky

And we now have a BlueSky account: @HypergridBusiness.

Here are a few other folks to follow:

You can see everyone HGB is following here.

Leave a note in the comments if you have a BlueSky account and want people to be able to follow you, or if you know of a grid that does.

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.

Get our monthly stats and all other OpenSim news delivered right to your mailbox every month.

We don’t spam! Read our privacy policy for more info.

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: 7,932 active users
  2. OSgrid: 4,743 active users
  3. GBG World: 2,512 active users
  4. Darkheart’s Playground: 2,277 active users
  5. Alternate Metaverse: 2,253 active users
  6. DigiWorldz: 2,068 active users
  7. WaterSplash: 1,531 active users
  8. Sciattisi Grid: 1,451 active users
  9. AvatarLife: 1,041 active users
  10. Trianon World: 998 active users
  11. Neverworld: 922 active users
  12. AviVerse AlterEgo: 915 active users
  13. AviWorlds: 871 active users
  14. Littlefield: 825 active users
  15. Party Destination Grid: 811 active users
  16. NakedWorldz: 797 active users
  17. Groovy Verse: 689 active users
  18. Eureka World: 570 active users
  19. Craft World: 556 active users
  20. Herederos Grid: 546 active users
  21. Astralia: 541 active users
  22. Gentle Fire Grid: 512 active users
  23. ZetaWorlds: 495 active users
  24. Vivo Sim: 478 active users
  25. Kitely: 456 active users

Online marketplaces for OpenSim content

There are currently 20,965 product listings in Kitely Market containing 41071 product variations, 35833 of which are exportable.

Kitely Market has delivered orders to 637 OpenSim grids to date.

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.

Last month, the numbers went down a little bit.

“Unfortunately a few stores were disabled because their owners passed away a long time ago and we lost the ability to transfer their sales earnings to them,” Kitely CEO Ilan Tochner told Hypergrid Business. “In most cases, we don’t do this as people’s next of kin take over their accounts and shut them down themselves, or keep those accounts active and update the PayPal payout address in order to enable us to transfer those stores’ earnings to them.”

This is a reminder to all of us to make provisions for our online accounts, especially those that are generating revenues.

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.

New grids

The following grids were added to our database this month: BloodMoon, Doghouse, Gaming Friends, Life Grid, Medieval Fantasy, New Horizon, SpaceGrid, The Hub Grid, and Xenolandia.

If you know of any public grid that we’re missing, please email me at maria@hypergridbusiness.com.

Suspended grids

The following grids were marked as suspended this month: 3World, CyberCity, CyberDataStorm, Eenhgrid, KittyBlue, Mysterious Grid 2, SunEden Resort, Virtual Gay Pride, and Virtual Grid.

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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