AviTron owner Alexander Pomposelli has a long history of shutting down the grid without warning. When he ran AviWorlds, I could count more than a dozen times that he closed that grid, often without warning. Residents complained that they had lost access to their territories, inventory and world currency balances.
At some point, he finally gave up and handed AviWorlds over to his former business partner, Josh Boam, who then started AviTron. But before launching AviTron, he briefly ran a Virtual Ville grid, which he shut down without warning in October 2020.
Well, AviTron may be closing at the end of the month.
“Yes, we are closing AviTron at the end of this month,” Pomposelli said. Hypergrid business. “AviTron is a business and has lost over 80% of its revenue. After 3 years online, I haven’t been able to get it legal. “I lost money every month.”
Residents will have until Aug. 28 to pull content from AviTron and move it to other grids, he said. To enable this process, AviTron will support hypergrid. The hypergrid address is e. avitronlogin.avitron.net:8002.
But currency reserves held by residents on the grid will not be exchangeable, he said.
Residents learned of the closure through AviTron’s Facebook page.
“Owners of private areas, people are leaving one by one, and now premium account holders are leaving as well. They are not paying on time and not at all,” Pompocelli wrote on Facebook yesterday.
Last night several people sent me copies of the announcement.
Then this afternoon I got a call from Pomposelli again.
“You just have to save money and keep it online,” he said. “I am studying it. But it can’t be the same as it is now.”
yoyo grid
When I co-hosted Inworld Review with Mal Burns, Burns called AviWorlds a “yo-yo grid.” Because it keeps going up and down.
AviWorlds, now under new management, is very stable and recently surpassed 5,000 registered users.
So maybe it’s not the grid that is the yoyo grid as the owner.
This is just my opinion, but after 14 years of dealing with OpenSim, it doesn’t help when the business model changes every month and you have no idea what your residents expect.
OpenSim grids generally fall into one of two categories: On one hand, there is the commercial grid. We provide reasonably priced land and good service, and pay close attention to technology and cost management. Some have been operating for years with little or no downtime by providing consistent value and service.
Other grids are run by groups, non-profits and individuals and rely heavily on volunteers. Since OpenSim is cheaper than renting land in Second Life, they can break even on costs, accept donations, or even cover server costs themselves. For example, role-playing groups and educational institutions can obtain a lot of cheap land through OpenSim and gain significant control when running their own grid. These grids often provide free or subsidized land to users, employees, or community members.
Commercial power grids rarely offer free land, and when they do, it is usually small parcels designed for residential or shop setting.
Additionally, grids typically choose whether or not to enable hypergrid and then stick to that decision. For example, schools and private role-playing grids may choose not to support HyperGrid to ensure student safety or protect proprietary content.
Universal grids tend to support hypergrids, allowing users to teleport in and out. This means people don’t have to create a new account to visit a grid, and people can message their friends on other grids. It also makes it easier for residents to get content delivered from Kitely Market or shop elsewhere on the grid. As of mid-July, more than 98% of all public OpenSim users were using a Hypergrid-enabled grid.
AviTron is an exception. Grid has changed its business model several times, and Pompocelli has changed his mind about whether to allow hypergrid travel or whether users will be able to export content (e.g. their own creations) from Grid. He has also experimented with NFTs, cryptocurrencies, free land, and paying users to spend time on the grid. He also changed his calling provider. AviTron also experienced some downtime in 2021, including extended outages.
He can’t seem to decide whether he’s running a private grid paid for out of his own pocket, or a commercial grid sustained by a steady stream of revenue.
He also claims to have made money through Google Ads. He said in a Facebook post that he was making $350 a month in advertising revenue. This is a very strange statement. To make significant money from advertising, you’ll need at least 10,000 pageviews per month, and usually much more. When we posted our ad, we certainly weren’t getting anywhere near that. Hypergrid businessand typically receives over 30,000 page views per month. OpenSim’s total active user base is 43,000 per month.
Typically, grid websites don’t get a lot of traffic. People come once or twice to learn about Grid and open an account. After that, all interactions take place within the world. Even the most popular grids won’t see more than a few hundred visitors a month unless you have a particularly active forum or blog. AviTron did not.
Warning to future AviTron users
If AviTron survives, or if it closes and comes back to life, I strongly urge users not to invest more time and money than they can afford.
If AviTron supports Hypergrid, people are encouraged to base their default avatar on another more reliable grid, such as OSgrid, Kitely, or DigiWorldz.
And if you need free land, get a free OSgrid region to run on your home computer or download the DreamGrid installer. If you own your own region, you can always save it as an OAR file. This is what I recommend to content creators, whether OpenSim or Second Life. Build and create in your private, private area or grid, then upload your creations to the commercial grid you want to use or sell.