I occasionally get emails from people starting new OpenSim grids, and wondering how they’re going to pay for them.
Here are the top five ways that OpenSim grids find success.
1. Commercial grids
These are the best-known grids, typically because they put the most time and resources into sales and marketing.
They make their money by renting land and by making commission through currency transactions.
The most common way to charge for land is to set up PayPal forms on their websites, though grids use other payment mechanisms as well, including in-world payments.
Grids typically offer a handful of the most popular configurations, with limits on the number of simultaneous visitors and prims. Users looking for other configurations would typically contact the grid’s support staff and ask for what they need.
The Great Canadian Grid also has a grid of the most popular options, and clicking on a particular offer takes users to a simple PayPal payment form.
(Image courtesy Great Canadian Grid.)
For currencies, grids either roll their own, use Podex to create a currency for their grid that can be traded on the Podex exchange, or use the Gloebit payment system. Gloebits can be spent on any grid that supports the currency, and is becoming increasingly popular with hypergrid-enabled grids and users.
Grids can also have multiple currencies. For example, several grids are currently testing the Gloebit system, with some regions using the grid’s existing in-house currency or Podex currency, and other regions using Gloebits.
Gloebit gives grid owners a cut of every transaction that takes place on their grid, currently set at 1 percent. Gloebit itself takes 2 percent of each transaction to cover its own costs.
How do grids set all this up? If they are owned by developers, they typically build everything themselves from scratch, or use open source modules.
Everyone else goes through a hosting service that takes care of all the infrastructure for them. Dreamland Metaverse has been the top-rated provider for the past few years, with newcomer DigiWorldz the second-favorite choice in last year’s reader survey. Other hosting vendors are here.
Typical services include OpenSim grid configuration, setup, management, and backups, website, currency, and technical support for end users.
Grid owners typically get discounts for purchasing large numbers of regions, and price their land so that they can cover their hosting costs, personnel costs, investment in content and events, and then make a reasonable profit.
2. Non-profit and donation-supported grids
A grid doesn’t have to make a profit to be successful.
The grid has a number of donation options on its website, using PayPal.
OSgrid also has a partnership set up with Amazon, where it gets a percentage of all purchases made through Amazon’s Smile program. A grid has to be a registered non-profit to participate. OSgrid is an official non-profit, which also means that direct contributions are tax-deductible.
Another non-commercial grid that accepts donation is Metropolis.
In addition to soliciting donations on their websites, successful non-profits also hold fundraisers, sell merchandise, and recruit sponsors. All these are potential options for OpenSim grids as well.
3. Niche service grid
My personal favorite business model for grids is the niche service grid. Success is measured in how well the grid meets the needs of its constituency.
Take, for example, Nara’s Nook. It’s not the biggest or busiest grid, but it has ranked very highly in our reader surveys because of what it offers.
Paradise region on Nara’s Nook, at world.narasnook.com:8900:Paradise.
Nara’s Nook is the top OpenSim destination for writers looking for community. The grid provides content, events, and virtual space to writers. It also rents out land, with fees set just high enough to cover server costs. Users can create local accounts, but almost all have their accounts on other grids, and visit Nara’s Nook via hypergrid teleport.
You can use a hosting company to set up a grid like this, or run it yourself if you have the skills and the server space. Letting users keep their primary accounts elsewhere will lower overhead.
4. School or company grid
Education and collaboration are two hot uses for OpenSim. Schools, government agencies, and businesses either set up their grids on their own, or use a hosting provider.
Dreamland Metaverse is particularly popular with enterprises, and offers a range of enterprise-focused services. For example, Dreamland can instantly create hundreds of new user accounts — one for every student or employee. Or turn off those accounts in bulk when they’re no longer needed. It can also set up roles, so that, for example, teachers can upload content or travel to other grids, but students cannot.
OpenSim lost land area and active users this month — on paper, at least — as one large commercial grid did not report its stats this month, and another grid suffered an outage.
The total OpenSim land area fell by 442 regions this month, to reach 72,978 standard region equivalents. This is the third month in a row that that saw drops in both the total reported OpenSim land area and total active users.
Last month, Great Canadian Grid had 748 regions, 5,450 registered users, and 1,162 active users, so it more than covered the loss in area, and was responsible for a good chunk of the loss in active users. If those stats had been available, the public OpenSim grids would have gained land area this month.
The grid deliberately decided not to publish its numbers.
“You know where my feelings are when it comes to stats and competition,” grid founder Roddie Macchi told Hypergrid Business.
InWorldz had been seeing steady declines in all its number for the past year.
The Great Canadian Grid showed increases last month — but it hasn’t fared as well for the year as a whole. At this time last year, the grid had 1,162 regions, and 1,626 active users, for a net drop of 414 regions, or more than a third of its land area. Its active users fell by 464 over the past year.
Meanwhile, in land gains, newly-launched Furry World added a total of 1,049 standard region equivalents to our stats this month. Kitely grew by the equivalent of 318 regions, and OpenSim Life by 92 regions.
OSgrid continues to be the grid with largest land area at 22,594 regions, followed by Kitely with 15,534 regions and Metropolis with 6,042 regions.
Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
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.
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.
Virtual ABDL Grid was not on the list this month due to an outage. Last month, it had 415 OpenSim active users. InWorldz and the Great Canadian Grid would likely both have been on this list if they had published their numbers.
Eureka World, an education-focused grid, was also down 245 active users compared to last month, OSgrid was down by 134 users, Island Oasis was down by 125, and Kitely was down by 122.
The biggest gainers this month were OpenSim Life, which nearly doubled its active users to 429, AllCity, which gained 182, and Neverworld, which opened a fashion district and gained 138 active users. Other gainers included Logicamp, with 132 more actives, and Genesis Metaverse, with 106 new active users.
Kitely Market lists over 9,000 products
There are currently 9,400 product listings at the Kitely Market, which contain 18,026 product variations, 13,346 of which are sold with the export permission.
Kitely has delivered to a total of 191 OpenSim grids to date.
Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)
Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.
Gloebits crossed the 200,000 Gloebits transaction volume mark this past month, to reach a new all-time high of 425,540 Gloebits in transactions, which is the equivalent of US $1,702.
Gloebits also added 124 user accounts in April.
Gloebits transactions and user account figures. (Gloebits Data.)
3rd Life to host car race this weekend
3rd Life grid will host a Car Race starting at 12:00 p.m. Pacific time on Saturday, May 20 at the Raceway Region. The race is open to local and hypergrid residents, and because it will coincide with the Armed Forces Day race, there will be different tanks and a hum V that can be used for racing, 3rd Life grid owner Tommy Seetan told Hypergrid Business.
“We have four races that day where the winner of the first three races will race in the forth race to see who is first, second and third place winners and they will get a trophy and there name up on the winners boards,” he said.
All cars will have same script for fairness. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)
Each trophy will be a standard cup trophy with the winner’s name, date of race and place they come from. All the race vehicles will have a similar script to keep the race fair.
The hypergrid address is 3rdlifegrid.com:8002:Raceway.
Logicamp opts for Podex currency
Logicamp has decided to go with Podex to provide its in-world currency, grid owner Didier Preudhomme told Hypergrid Business.
“You can go to the sandbox to create new objects and then rent a plot in a frequented place to put them on sale,” Preudhomme said. “You can export them, print them in 3D or put them on sale in Second Life or the Kitely Market or export your objects on another grid.”
Creators can use items from Sandbox and the Free Zone 1 and 2 to build and decorate their creations. (Image courtesy Logicamp.)
The hypergrid address for the Sandbox is logicamp.org:8002:sandbox.
The grid has also repaired the password recovery feature but is advising members to create a new avatar.
Podex, Gloebits, and self-operated currencies are currently the three main options for commercial grids looking to create an in-world economy. Podex provides the infrastructure that allows each grid to have its own currency symbol, and then allows users to trade currency between different grids. However, Podex currencies are not hypergrid-enabled, and cannot be used for shopping on foreign grids like Gloebits can.
OutWorldz now tracking grids
OutWorldz owner Fred Beckhusen is now tracking up time for OpenSim grids and the list is available from the Known Grid Space database. It currently lists 278 grids of which 37 are hypergrid-enabled mini-grids created using the easy-to-use DreamWorld OpenSim installer. (Read our review here.)
Online grids are checked every hour while offline grids are checked once every four hours.
The data is gathered using the Hyperica grid crawler and the Dreamworld version of Opensim’s Dynamic DNS and diagnostics system.
You can also add your grid to the list here by submitting the loginURI and a short description.
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, it may have been 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.
In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be under-counted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.
May 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 1,238 different publicly-accessible grids, 280 of which were active this month, and 207 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.
Key OpenSim stats fell this month, as two popular grids — InWorldz and The Adult Grid — opted not to report their total land area or their active users.
InWorldz has been the most popular grid every month from 2012 on, and had 5,276 active users last month. However, both their active users and total region numbers have been falling over the course of the past year and, saying that they didn’t want to be unfavorably — and, they said, unfairly — compared to other grids, they stopped publishing these numbers.
The Adult Grid did not explain why they stopped publishing their stats, which have actually been rising recently. The grid was on our 25 most popular grids list last month, as well.
“The amount of registered users will be the only one provided as seen on our website,” grid co-founder Constanza Amsterdam told Hypergrid Business.
The Adult Grid reported 355 active users last month, and the equivalent of 428 standard regions.
Mostly as a result of these reporting changes, but also due to the loss of a few hundred active users on OSgrid and Metropolis grid, the total number of active users went down by 6,140, for a new total of 30,588 active users this month.
Both InWorldz and The Adult Grid are closed grids, meaning that users cannot connect home-hosted regions, or teleport to other grids.
Without their numbers, the proportion of active users who are on hypergrid-enabled grids has risen to 97 percent, up from 79 percent last month. Again, this does not mean that 97 percent of all active OpenSim users are on the hypergrid. It means that 97 percent of users on grids that report their stats are on the hypergrid.
We now have 230 active hypergrid-enabled grids in our database, 45 grids that are not on the hypergrid, and four grids that we haven’t yet figured out — Atlantis, Moonlight Grid, and OpenSim Pride 2017.
The total number of standard region equivalents also fell, by 468, for a new total of 73,420. The hypergrid now accounts for 97 percent of reported land area in OpenSim, up from 95 percent last month. The change is less dramatic because the InWorldz and The Adult Grid accounted for a smaller share of land area than they did of active users.
Registered users continued to increase, since both grids continued to report those stats, to 544,008. However, registered users totals only go down when an entire grid goes out of business, since grids rarely delete unused user accounts from the databases.
Biggest gainers in land area were ZetaWorlds with 1,644 new standard region equivalents, followed by OSgrid with 442, PMGrid with 338, Kitely with 329, and Genesis MetaVerse with 114.
Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
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.
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.
OSgrid was the most popular of the grids that reported their numbers this month. Again, it is almost certain that InWorldz would have been at the top of the list if they were still publishing these stats.
We’ve added hypergrid addresses to the list this month, to make it easier for readers to visit the grids that are hypergrid-enabled. To visit other grids, please click on the grid name to go to the grid’s website, and follow the provided instructions to create a new avatar account and configure your viewer.
The biggest gainer this month was Island Oasis, with 195 new active users, followed by The Public World at 158, OpenSimLife with 123 new active users, Dynamic Worldz with 101 and Virtual ABDL Grid with 100.
That put the grid in fourth place in new registrations, after Kitely with 2,288 new registrations, followed by InWorldz with 1,781, and Emilac with 963.
The full list of all hypergrid-enabled grids, ranked by traffic numbers, can be found here.
Kitely Market now reaches 190 grids
Kitely Market, OpenSim’s online marketplace, now delivers to 190 grids. That’s more than two-thirds of the total number of grids in our database.
There are currently 9,347 products listed at the market, and these contain 17,768 product variations, of which 13,116 are exportable.
Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)
Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.
VirTec vending network processed $880 worth of transactions this month, nearly double last month’s $475. The network also signed up ten new merchants last month.
There were concerns earlier this month that the network would stop growing, or disappear entirely, when the owner announced that he would no longer accept new customers. However. DigiWorldz just bought the company, so that operations are expected to continue.
InWorldz accounted for the bulk of the purchases that were processed through the system, followed by the Great Canadian Grid and DigiWorldz.
March spending, in US dollars, on individual grids. (VirTec data.)
Gloebit usage continues steady rise
The total value of transactions using the multi-grid Gloebit currency rose 74 percent this month compared to last, from US $709.74 to $1,236.14.
The number of users on the platform rose from 471 to 576, an increase of 22 percent.
Gloebits transactions and user account figures. (Gloebits Data.)
Some grids have Gloebits as their official in-world currency, used throughout the grid. Other grids have Gloebits enabled on just a few regions, while using their own currency elsewhere, or leave the choice up to the region owner.
Genesis Metaverse revamps Welcome Center
The Genesis Metaverse grid redesigned its welcome center.
Some content was purchased for the rebuilt, but some was also created by grid residents, grid owner Cliff Hopkins told Hypergrid Business.
“It looks stunning,” he said. “The pictures really do it no justice.”
(Image courtesy Genesis MetaVerse.)
International Spaceflight Museum to launch next week
The International Spaceflight Museum, a Texas-based non-profit corporation solely supported by private donors and which has operated in Second Life since 2005, will have a grand opening ceremony for its Kitely branch of the museum at 5:00 p.m. Pacific Time on Friday, April 21 on Kitely’s ISMuseum region.
It will be a four-region world and open to the public, including hypergridders, ISMuseum president and founder Kat Lemieux told Hypergrid Business.
“The Grand Opening will include entertainment by Agatha, and a reading of a Robert Heinlein story by Seanchai, which we hope to broadcast into Second Life to demonstrate our new cross-grid communications capabilities,” she said.
(Image courtesy International Spaceflight Museum.)
The team wants to add new exhibits, new looks and a suggestion box where interested visitors can offer their ideas on how to enlarge and improve the collection.
The will be exhibiting a variety of items.
“Some of the exhibits include full-scale rockets, including a Saturn V and a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, and several Brazilian sounding rockets,” she said. “We also have full-scale models of several space probes and satellites, and a Lunar Rover, to name just a few of the attractions.”
The hypergrid address is grid.kitely.com:8002:ISMuseum.
The new grid now has 31 users on its four public and three private regions. Infinite Metaverse Alliance is a research and development foundation that seeks to improve and streamline OpenSim code development, standards and technologies.
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, it may have been 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.
In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.
April 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 1,232 different publicly-accessible grids, 278 of which were active this month, and 207 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.
A number of grids are hosting Easter events including Easter Egg hunts and contests this Easter season.
That includes two events on OSgrid.
OSgrid‘s Easter Egg contest began last Monday and will go through Friday, April 14. The Event Plaza has been re-decorated for the occasion.
Participants are competing to create the best decorative egg from the day the event started, and these entries will be voted by other people. The contests run until Thursday, April 13 when voting also stops, and the winner will be announced at the Easter Friday Party that takes place on April 14. Live performing musicians will entertain at the party.
Participants of the Egg Hunt will win freebies created by the grid team.
The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Event Plaza.
There is also going to be a dinosaur Egg Hunt on Teraphosa region to celebrate its grand opening. The hunt will start on Thursday, April 13 and run through Sunday, April 23.
The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Teraphosa.
Easter on Island Oasis
Island Oasis Grid will also host two Easter Egg Hunts, at 12:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. Pacific time on Sunday, April 23, and the Easter celebration will continue for a whole week.
The reason for starting the event at different times is to accommodate different time zones, Island Oasis grid director Liz Harrington, also known as Sophia Paolino, in-world told Hypergrid Business.
“The event will be held at our Holiday Oasis sim and will be open to local account residents as well as hypergrid visitors,” she said.
The hypergrid address is islandoasisgrid.biz:8002.
Littlefield holds hunt, dance party
Littlefield Grid will also host its fourth annual Restrained Life Viewer Easter Egg Hunt at 3:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. Pacific time on Sunday, April 16 at the Stone Haven region. You must have the Restrained Life Viewer turned on to participate.
The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Stonehaven.
The grid will also host a Easter dance party involving live music, DJ and dancing at 8:00 a.m. to 1:00 a.m. Pacific time on Friday, April 14 at the Speakeasy Dance Club.
The hypergrid address is lfgrid.com:8002:Speakeasy.
KiWo Easter Egg Hunt
The KiWo Easter Egg Hunt at KiWo Grid kicked off last Saturday at the Ostersim region and will go on until Sunday, April 23. The Kroatan Grid is co-sponsoring the event.
Participants are to search for 22 eggs, 11 of which breaks after touch to give out a gift when clicked, while others are decoys and a little chicken shows up when they are touched.
The hypergrid address is kikiandwollex.de:8002:Ostersim.
Easter Egg Hunt has started in KiWo grid. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)
OpenSim grids reported a net fall in both regions and active users this month, but the regions drop was due to one grid with server issues, and the active users drop was due to a couple of grids that had problems with their stats.
Overall, OpenSim lost 975 active users this month, with DreamNation, which had 559 actives last month, not reporting its active user numbers and Sinful moving to a new hosting provider. The Public World also suffered some server issues, resulting in a drop of more than 400 actives on that grid alone.
And the number of regions went down by 839 standard region equivalents, as Virtual Worlds Grid turned off the less-used servers to allow for a greater than usual load on its welcome regions. That led to a net drop of 2,380 regions on that grid alone.
Without these issues, both land area and active user numbers would have shown an increase this month.
Meanwhile, registered user numbers went up by 13,228, the highest gain in the last two years.
There are now 272 active grids, which represents a six percent increase or an additional 16 grids this month.
Party Destination Grid gained the highest number of registered users — 3661, but that’s only because they just made their grid public and we added their data to our list this month. They still had the registered users or most of them before becoming public. Kitely gained 2028 and InWorldz gained 1551 new registered users. All the rest had less than 500 new registered users with OSgrid closest at 452 and Island Oasis 328.
The number of hypergrid enabled regions, which reached a record high in January, fell by 700 regions this month.
Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
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.
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 Party Destination Grid is on the most popular list for the first time. The grid, which had previously run in private mode, opened up to the public this month and we began tracking its stats.
As mentioned before, Sinful Grid and The Public World both saw a drop in active user numbers. The other biggest change on this list was that InWorldz lost 210 active users, though it retained its spot as the most popular grid.
InWorldz’ share of all active OpenSim users has fallen from a high of 40 percent in the summer of 2012 to its current low of just 15 percent. But the next-most-popular grid, OSgrid, still has a long ways to go before it catches up.
InWorldz also has the highest number of registered users of any grid, at 164,806, with OSgrid in second place at 115,300. InWorldz is also a grid that brings in a lot of new users. This month, it reported 1,551 new registrations, second only to Kitely with its 2,018 new users.
InWorldz is a closed commercial grid, meaning that users cannot teleport to other grids, go shopping on other grids, attend events there, join hypergrid groups, or send messages to friends on other grids. OSgrid and Kitely both allow their users to teleport to other grids.
In fact, many closed grids have either been moving to the hypergrid, losing users, or shutting down over the past few years. Today, non-InWorldz closed grids total just 1,526 active users, or about 4 percent of OpenSim’s active user base.
(Hypergrid Business Data.)
The hypergrid also offers more renting options for users, with average prices lower than on InWorldz, and some grids allow users to connect their own home-based regions for free. In fact, several grids offer free parcels or even entire regions to users. As a result, hypergrid-enabled grids currently account for more than 95 percent of all OpenSim land area.
The full list of all hypergrid-enabled grids, ranked by traffic numbers, can be found here.
Kitely Market now reaches 185 grids
Kitely’s online shopping platform, the Kitely Market, now exports to a total of 185 OpenSim grids. There are 9,104 products are listed on the market, groups into 17,429 variations. Out of these, 12,502 are exportable.
Growth in exportable and non-exportable content on the Kitely Market. (Kitely data.)
Ever since Kitely turned on the hypergrid export functionality, exportable content has been growing at a much faster rate than non-exportables, as merchants increasingly become comfortable to selling to the hypergrid.
VirTec Network sales down slightly
The total revenue for the 72 merchants using the VirTec vending network for the month was $475, a drop of 17 percent from last month.
InWorldz still had the highest number of merchants with 14 merchants, followed by DigiWorldz with 10 merchants, although Genesis Metaverse had the highest number of transactions with 195 transactions. InWorldz had 179 transactions while DigiWorldz had 90 transactions.
February spending, in US dollars, on individual grids. (VirTec data.)
Twelve more grids adopt Gloebits multi-grid currency
The number of grids that use the Gloebits currency on one or more regions has grown from three to 15 over the past month, Gloebits CEO Christopher Colosi told Hypergrid Business, and the list now includes OSgrid and DigiWorldz.
Some of the grids accepting Gloebits are listed on the Gloebits app discovery page.
“I expect to see a couple more pop up on the discovery page by the end of the week,” Colosi said.
For example, one grid which has recently deployed the currency is 3rd Life Grid, which now has two Gloebits shopping regions. Both local and hypergrid merchants can sell products on these regions. Creators from other grids can contact DJTommy Seetan to set them up with the shop, grid spokesman Gary Justus told Hypergrid Business.
The hypergrid address is 3rdlifegrid.com:8002:3rdlife Stores 3.
Sinful Grid has also added a shopping region named Sinful Grid Gloebit Mall just for Gloebit purchases. The grid is offering free stores, each with up to 400 prims.
The hypergrid address for the Gloebits Mall is login.sinfulgrid.com:8002:Sinful Grid Gloebit Mall.
Grids can opt to have the entire grid use the Gloebits currency, or enable individual regions. Other regions can have no currency at all, or a grid’s own currency. More info about Gloebits and how they work is here.
Total transactions, in US Dollars, and total users on the Gloebits platform. (Gloebit data.)
Gloebits processed about 100,000 Gloebits, the equivalent of about US $400, between January 28 and February 28, and this month is on track to process about 180,000 Gloebits, or $720, said Colosi.
In addition to more grids signing up, more users did as well. Gloebits had 200 people using the currency as of the end of 2016, and has more than doubled since then to 471.
ZanGrid Hypershopping I and II regions are also Gloebit-enabled. (Image courtesy ZanGrid.)
AviWorlds is back online, and back in the garage
After a short-lived experiment with getting hosting from a solid, reputable provider, AviWorlds is back in its garage after the owner failed to pay for their servers on time.
The grid has also changed its loginURI, to login.aviworlds.com:8002. A few regions are back online and the grid is open to visitors. There’s no website yet, but the Facebook page is back up.
The rest of the functionality will be built by this summer, grid owner Alexsandro Pomposelli told Hypergrid Business.
“Its not full power yet,” he said. “It has a few regions online until June, when I will go full power with ads, bill boards on the beach in Brazil and also building structure for the grid.”
And he still plans to give away 1,000 free regions.
“Only the ones that can build an entire region, knows how to build or can pay someone to build it for them will qualify for the free region,” he said. “The ones that cant build yet will get a plot 4,096 square meters with 937 prims already built for them with a home and all.”
The grid shut down earlier this month with no warning to residents. At first, because the social media accounts were also closed and Pomposelli could not be reached by anyone, we counted the grid as closed. But since it was up relatively quickly, and there was no official announcement of closing, we’re going to count it as a temporary outage instead of a full shutdown. That means that AviWorlds has closed up shot nine times, and is now in its tenth incarnation.
Public Grid is back online, has a new server
Public Grid, which had some server issues for a few days, is now back online and running, and most of the regions are back as well, according to a Saturday post. Owners of affected avatars may need to re-register. The loginURI has not changed and is still thepublicworld.de:8002 but users may need to double-check that their viewer settings are correct.
The grid has put in place a second server to avoid future problems but is testing everything on it before bringing it online, said the announcement.
Public Grid is now back online. (Image courtesy David Kariuki.)
Party Destination, PMGrid offering free land
Party Destination Grid, a closed grid that has been in testing for two years and opened to the public this year, is offering its first 100 regions for free to content creators, of which 50 regions are still left. Communities or schools can also claim free land for learning and teaching purposes.
Those who claim the free land are required to create content for the free region within four months. But users can also opt for a plot measuring 7400 sqm or a store if a region is too big for you to create and fill content, grid owner Aleš Moškon told Hypergrid Business.
Aleš Moškon
“We allow users to upload OAR or IAR files but first we all check with our own mechanism if everything is legal,” he said.
Once testing is done, the team will charge US $27 for a full region.
The grid is not hypergrid-enabled, but is currently working on setting up Kitely Market deliveries.
The lack of hypergrid access is due to security concerns, he said.
“As we all know hypergrid is not so great if it’s in the wrong hands,” he said. However, they have users from all over the world, he said.
Another grid which has recently announced a new free land offer is PM Grid, one of the oldest grids in OpenSim. The grid celebrated its ninth anniversary last month and is hypergrid-enabled.
The grid is offering free regions to builders and the land is given according to what the user wants to use it for, grid owner Bob Wellman told Hypergrid Business.
“I talk to them to see what they want build and try to, as far as I can, allocate enough land for that,” he said. “That could be a parcel a standard region or a large var region. The only proviso is use it or lose it.”
Sinful Grid has moved to DigiWorldz, a change that has come with some upgrades and new functionalities such as search and offline IM to email. Users need to update the viewer URL to loginsinfulgrid.com:8002 and migrate their account to the new service to change to the new control panel, Sinful Grid CEO Tony Moore told Hypergrid Business.
The grid has also posted new land prices, with a 15,000-prim region available for $14 per month.
Users who rented regions under the previous price schedule can keep their existing prices, Moore added.
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, it may have been 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.
In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.
March 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 1,216 different publicly-accessible grids, 272 of which were active this month, and 194 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 Educator Commons store on OSgrid’s Wright Plaza. (Image by Maria Korolov.)
To help schools and educators create, access and share more virtual learning and educational resources, an Educator Commons shop has been set up on OSgrid‘s Wright Plaza region by Kay McLennan, a professor of practice at Tulane University.
The shop, which is hypergrid-enabled, has virtual world learning and teaching tools, freebies, Do-It-Yourself resources, hypergrid links to showcase education builds by the community, and a directory of OpenSim educational content creators.
The hypergrid address is hg.osgrid.org:80:Wright Plaza.
The shop will help educators create their own simulations easily and at a low cost, while accessing free tips about virtual education matters. There is free give-away content too, and all will be distributed under the open source Creative Commons licensing, McLennan told Hypergrid Business.
“If any content in the shop is believed to be distributed under a different, more restrictive, copyright or license, I request notification and I will immediately remove the content from the shop,” she said.
Interior of the Educator Commons store on OSgrid’s Wright Plaza. (Image by Maria Korolov.)
In addition to freebies that visitors can grab copies of right in the shop, there are also links to downloadable resources such the OAR files for the BioZone by Peter Miller and the Undersea Observatory by Justin Reeve.
There is also lots of information for educators who are getting started in OpenSim.
Interior of the Educator Commons store on OSgrid’s Wright Plaza. (Image by Maria Korolov.)
Educators can use resources on the second floor to get free land, learn how to host their own grids and where to host them, and download free items such as buildings and terrains. There are also links to many more OAR and IAR files available to download on the web.
Educators can also share hypergrid addresses of college-level or K-12 showcase hypergrid destinations. To do so, you leave a note card in front of the shop or post the information to the Google Plus group.
Rooftop hypergrid gates at the Educator Commons store on OSgrid’s Wright Plaza. (Image by Maria Korolov.)
A Showcase Garden on the roof of the shop contains slideshows of sample educational builds and landmarks to the showcase builds.
The group plans to add more educational content, tips, and other resources that allow showcasing and sharing of educational content.
Educators can also search and find various providers of virtual world educational simulation consulting services for hire from the Directory of Content Providers on the second floor.
To be listed as a provider, all a content creator needs to do is provide a freebie virtual educational content for educators to use. You can do so in-world or through the community’s Google plus page.
Active user numbers on the OpenSim hypergrid crossed the 80 percent share mark this month, reaching a new record high, while the hypergrid share of land area reached 95 percent, another new record high.
The hypergrid gained 1,781 new active users to reach a new high of 30,655, or 81 percent of all 37,703 actives. Closed closed grids actually lost 454 active users this month, with slight gains on Islands of Enlightenment, Virtual Highway and the Adult Grid not able to make up for InWorldz‘ loss of 612 actives.
However, InWorldz continued to bring in new users. The grid reported 1,737 new registrations this month, second only to Kitely‘s 1,978 registrations. These two commercial grids have been responsible for the largest share of new registrations for the past couple of years.
The total number of hypergrid-enabled regions rose by 4,747 to reach an all-time high of 71,019, while the number of regions on closed grids actually fell slightly.
OpenSim as a whole added 4,375 standard region equivalents this month to reach a new high of 74,727 regions.
Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
The number of closed active OpenSim regions went down by a huge 11 percent or 809 regions this month.
The largest grid in terms of regions remains OSgrid with 21,541 regions, followed by Kitely with 14,606 regions and Metropolis with 5,905 regions.
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.
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 for active users this month was Genesis Metaverse, which switched its hosting provider last month. Its back end is now run by DigiWorldz, and the change seems to have paid off. The active user increase this month was the largest the grid has seen since it launched last September.
The hypergrid continues to function more like one large grid, with an increasing number of multi-grid events, communities, and groups. In fact, all the closed non-InWorldz grids put together only had 1,425 active users this month.
It’s getting harder than ever for a closed grid to attract users. Most general-purpose social grids have already switched to the hypergrid in order to allow their users to visit other grids to attend events, go shopping, and hang out with friends. Some grids, however, do benefit from remaining closed, including school grids and those with proprietary gaming content.
(Hypergrid Business data.)
InWorldz retained its spot as the most popular grid despite reporting a net loss of 612 active users this month. That grid’s share of all active OpenSim users has fallen from a high of 40 percent in the summer of 2012 to its current low of just 15 percent. But the next-most-popular grid, OSgrid, still has a long ways to go before it catches up.
When InWorldz first launched, it offered a premium experience with the largest variety of commercial content available in OpenSim. Since then, other grids have matched, or even surpassed, InWorldz in terms of functionality and stability, and the Kitely Market has begun offering a large and very fast-growing collection of products that can be delivered to most other OpenSim grids.
The hypergrid also offers more renting options for users, with average prices lower than on InWorldz, and some grids allow users to connect their own home-based regions for free. In fact, several grids offer free parcels or even entire regions to users. As a result, hypergrid-enabled grids currently account for 95 percent of all OpenSim land area.
The full list of all hypergrid-enabled grids, ranked by traffic numbers, can be found here.
Help OpenSim by shopping on Amazon
You can now support OpenSim testing and development when you shop at Amazon — at no extra cost to you.
OSgrid, a non-profit, has created an Amazon Smile account. Just visit the link, make this your default shopping option, and from then on, whenever you make a purchase, Amazon will make a donation to OSgrid.
It’s the oldest grid. The grid with the most user-connected regions. And the grid that’s the official testing ground for OpenSim development. By running cutting edge versions of OpenSim, the grid is able to subject the software to large-scale, real-world testing.
Due to its size, OSgrid is able to push OpenSim to its boundaries, and beyond. Lessons learned are then incorporated into core code, and benefit all grid owners.
OSgrid’s Wright Plaza at hg.osgrid.org:80:Wright Plaza.
OSgrid is an open grid, allowing anyone to connect regions, both home-based and professionally hosted. That means a lot of stress on centralized grid services, which are run on servers paid for by donations. Supporting this grid helps home users, schools, non-profits and others have unlimited free regions on a major grid. Plus, many third-party hosting companies offer regions on OSgrid and the competition helps improve service and drive down prices.
Because of its size, popularity and low prices, OSgrid has become an incubator — for communities that start out here then go on to launch their own grids, and also for OpenSim hosting companies, some of which have started out by offering regions on OSgrid and then expanded to offer complete hosting services.
Unfortunately, it was not possible to recover user accounts created last year, Logicamp grid owner Didier Preud’homme told Hypergrid Business.
“Those who created an avatar on Logicamp last year must therefore recreate an avatar,” he said.
The grid is now much more stable following the installation of an external router, he added.
“I have some free regions to distribute so those interested can contact me by internal messaging or by mail to the address logicamp@skynet.be indicating ‘FREELAND’ as object of the message,” he said.
Second World up after upgrade, with new currency
Second World grid, which went off the air for 15 days since January 26 for an upgrade, has reopened.
Updates include a new currency system, where Podex will now be providing the system for managing currencies, sale and purchase, redemption and merchant payment processing, grid owner Logan Hunter told Hypergrid Business.
Existing users have not lost any money due to the upgrade, he added, since the previous currency was distributed for free to members.
New airplane on Neverworld Grid
(Image courtesy Neverworld.)
Neverworld Grid now has a new airplane at the Banning International Airport. It is a HUD with realistic indicator controls.
“We have gotten really good reviews from people around the hypergrid on the plane,” Neverworld grid owner Govega Sachertorte told Hypergrid Business. “In my opinion, it is the best one in OpenSim.”
All set for the Cornflakes Week and other events
(Image courtesy Thirza Ember.)
OpenSim community is celebrating Cornflakes Week the last week of this month to celebrate silliness, and a number of grids are participating in this year’s event, including OSgrid, Craft, FrancoGrid, 3rd Rock Grid, Lighthouse Point Grid, Kitely, Radiola and Metropolis with safaris, a big hypergrid-wide party and other parties, dances and concerts from February 21 to 28.
You can also collect event items from hypergrid.org:8002:Cornflakes Tribute region and watch everything unfold on the Cornflakes Week Community Google Plus page.
Tangle Grid’s Mesh Expo now open
Tangle Grid is revamping its hypergrid expos with a number of events this year.
This month, it’s hosting the Mesh Expo, which started on Sunday, February 5 and runs until Sunday, March 5 where participants will build using mesh and display their builds for others to see.
Airship from Wicked Kitty Industries showcased at the Tangle Grid Mesh Expo.
The grid will also host the Arts and Pictures Expo scheduled for April 2 to April 30, Sci-Fi Expo from May 7 to June 4, the Halloween Expo starting on Sunday, October 15 and the Winter Expo starting on Friday, December 1.
“We have made a two-by-two var region with a new expo center,” Tangle Grid co-founder Leslie Kling told Hypergrid Business. “The grounds will hold almost anything you want to show off at the expo.”
The hypergrid address is tanglegrid.net:8002:Expo Isle.
Konk Combat Grid opens with new role play system
The Konk Combat grid has just opened to the public and features a multi-grid role play and combat system. In addition to role play features, it also offers the ability to create games and and combat sims. Users can practice crafting, fishing, picking lock and many other skills.
Mica Breen
The grid currently has three regions running the system.
Konk grid owner Mica Breen told Hypergrid Business that he decided to expand from the Kitely Market to his own grid in order to make the products more affordable.
The basic system costs US $10, and the full system, with all its add-ons, costs $50 on the Kitely Market.
“Now we allow anyone who rents a sim from us to use this system at no extra charge,” he said. “Our sims are 15,000 prims for $15 a month including an easy-to-use hud to set up the combat and role playing.”
The hypergrid address is konk-grid.net:8002:Konk Grid Welcome Area
Infinite Metaverse Alliance launches to help share code and tools
(Image courtesy Infinite Metaverse Alliance.)
Infinite Metaverse Alliance, a research and development philanthropic foundation, has launched with the goal of advancing virtual worlds and virtual reality technology. According to its announcement, it will offer source code, easily understood and accessible software, grid hosting, grid research, private online meeting tools, chat room tools, shared presentation tools, voting tools, and desktop sharing tools among other things.
Community, professionals, academia, non-profits, and businesses are all open to join as members.
The community now has an Infinite Metaverse Alliance test grid running on the Halcyon version of OpenSim. Halcyon, which is currently being developed by the US Army’s Moses project, does not support hypergrid teleports yet.
VirTec Vend network
InWorldz was the busiest grid last month on the VirTec vending network, with 14 merchants and a total of 276 transactions. Genesis Metaverse was in second place, with 205 transactions divided between six merchants.
Total revenues on the top 15 grids on the network was $569, when converted to US dollars.
January spending, in US dollars, on individual grids. (VirTec data.)
VirTec is an in-world shopping platform that works with local grid currencies or Gloebits.
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, it may have been 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.
In addition, if a grid wants to be included in the monthly stats report and the most active and largest grid lists, it needs to have a stats page that shows the number of unique 30-day logins, and the total number of regions on the grid. In order for the grid not to be undercounted, 30-day active users stat should include hypergrid visitors, and the land area should be in the form of standard region equivalents, square meters, or square kilometers.
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 1,204 different publicly-accessible grids, 259 of which were active this month, and 185 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.
Public OpenSim grids gained land area, registered users, and active users this month, with active users reaching a new all-time high.
Grids reported a net increase of 96 active users, for a new total of 35,788 actives, despite the end of the OpenSimulator Community Conference. That event accounted for a one-time addition of over 500 active users to the stats last month. In addition, the Adult Grid did not report its active users this month. Last month, the grid accounted for 322 actives. Without those two grids in the stats, the total active numbers would have increased by 901 users.
The number of registered users grew by 9,275, for a new total of 520,834. There was also an increase of 3,552 regions, for a new land area of 70,008 standard region equivalents.
Land area of OpenSim’s public grids, in standard region equivalents. (Hypergrid Business data.)
OSGrid was the biggest land gainer this month, with 1,323 new regions for a new total of 20,467, comfortably keeping its place as the largest grid in OpenSim. Kitely gained 330 new regions and has the second largest number of regions at 14,433.
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.
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.
Most of the major grids reported active user gains this month.
Metropolis gained 229 active users, Genesis Metaverse gained 182, and OSgrid gained 147. InWorldz, OpenSim’s most popular grid, started off the new year on a positive note with a gain of 151 new active users, after losing more than 500 actives last year.
Below is a list of 25 most popular grids this month based on active user numbers.
Meanwhile, the hypergrid as a whole is beginning to function more and more like one large grid, with an increasing number of multi-grid events, communities, and groups.
(Hypergrid Business data.)
Hypergrid-enabled grids, where users can teleport freely to other grids, are now home to 80 percent of OpenSim’s active users, a record high share. They accounted for 68 percent of actives at the beginning of 2016, and just 52 percent at the start of 2015.
Looking at land area, the numbers are even more dramatic, since the hypergrid offers more renting options for users, and some grids even allow users to connect their own home-based regions for free. Hypergrid-enabled grids currently account for 95 percent of all OpenSim land area, another record high.
The full list of all hypergrid-enabled grids, ranked by traffic numbers, can be found here.
Kitely Market statistics
The Kitely Market now delivers to a record-high 165 grids.
Customers from any hypergrid-enabled grid, and from many closed grids, can order from a selection of 8,784 products, also a record high, which are available in 16,870 variations.
On the Kitely Market, like on Amazon, different versions of the same product — different colors of a dress, for example, or different permission options — are grouped together into one listing.
Of particular interest is the export permission, which allows content to be delivered to other grids, or delivered to Kitely then taken to other grids via exports or hypergrid travels. This month, 11,900 of the variations were exportable, or 71 percent of the total.
(Kitely data.)
All hypergrid-enabled grids, by default, can accept Kitely Market deliveries unless they specifically configure their grid settings to keep these deliveries out. Grids that are not accessible via the hypergrid can still accept Kitely Market deliveries, if they choose, by following these instructions.
Craft, Dorena’s World both turn seven this month
Two of the oldest OpenSim grids, both European, are turning seven years old this month.
Craft, which is based in Italy, is celebrating with a party and building competition.
(Image courtesy Craft.)
Craft’s party will be held on January 27 and will feature the grid’s sixth annual Building Competition, which is open to residents of both Craft and other OpenSim worlds, Craft spokesman Raffaele Macis told Hypergrid Business. The winner in the building competition will receive a full region in Craft for one year, the second runners up a 10,000-prim region for one year and all entries should be given to Licu Rau or Tao Quan, in-world, by January 21.
(Image courtesy Dorenas World.)
Germany-based Dorena’s World, however, is postponing its celebration until the summer, grid owner Dorena Verne told Hypergrid Business, to coincide with the seventh anniversary of GridTalk, a German-language discussion forum for the OpenSim community.
“Much has happened to it, sometimes times off, laugh, cry, just everything that makes a together,” she said. “I would like to thank all the inhabitants and guests for this time, which I have been able to spend together with you until today.”
Transitions
We added two new grids to our list this month.
(Image courtesy OpenSim Life.)
Opensim Life will have its official grand opening on February 1.
Early visitors can stop by now, however, and check out the “Debauchery” region. The grid will focus on vehicles, grid owner Rich Williams told Hypergrid Business. The grid plans to offer affordable regions, in-world economy, groups, profiles and events, as well as in-world and website-based classifieds and search features.
There will also be a contest in which the winning group will get a free region for three months, he said.
You can find more information about the grid on their Google Plus and Twitter pages.
(Image courtesy Encore Entertainment.)
The Encore Escape is another new grid that launched this past weekend with a big opening party. You can follow it on Facebook or Twitter.
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, it may have been 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.
January 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 1,200 different publicly-accessible grids, 253 of which were active this month, and 189 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.
