This morning, I was curious, so I went into WordPress and checked the blog viewer statistics. I used to check it much more frequently during the heyday of the metaverse boom and bust between 2019 and 2022, when blog traffic surged to unprecedented levels and then crashed, as you can see in a screenshot I took from WordPress Statistics last March.
One notable event during that period was Facebook’s rebranding as Meta on October 28, 2021, amid Mark Zuckerberg’s expensive efforts to transform his company into a Metaverse powerhouse (particularly on the hardware side, with somewhat mixed but still undeniable success) with its Quest line of wireless VR/AR headsets.
Then, in 2022, the artificial intelligence hype cycle began. The world seemed to keep moving, as a wave of new generative AI tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT led to an unexpected surge in interest and a noticeable drop in visitors to the RyanSchultz.com blog. (It didn’t help that I had to take a break from blogging for most of 2024 and 2025 because I was so busy with my salaried job as an academic librarian that I took six months of sick leave to treat burnout. As a result, I posted almost nothing for most of 2025.)
Anyway, as I said, I was curious so I checked out what the top 10 most popular (i.e. most viewed) blog posts were last year.
One of the things that never ceases to amaze and amuse me is how much traffic certain blog posts receive. This is a relatively rare post where I write about sexual topics! To be clear, I’m not a cautious person, but I’m not really interested in writing about adult/sexually oriented metaverse platforms. Because I think pixelex is boring. Therefore I will leave it at that. specific Document your niche in the metaverse for others. 😉
Anyway, 2025 was no exception to the rule. Three of the top ten most popular blog posts were about such adult topics (By the way, all three links are very safe for work):
This proves the old adage: sex sells. Or at least there are a lot of people searching for sex on the Internet. (I need to rent out prime advertising space on that sex-in-VRChat blog post. I’m sure I could make some money from it! I have no idea Where Sex Happens in VRChat. Sorry, everyone. 😂😆🤣)
The second slot shows the number of people who went straight to my home page (https://ryanschultz.com) without clicking on the link to that particular blog post. That’s not surprising.
My coverage of the many changes to Second Life in 2025 (particularly the new Avatar Welcome Kit, which includes a LeLutka Lite head and Legacy Basic body) ranked #4 in the top ten.
And, as I said before, I’m cutting back on my Second Life coverage (even though I’ve already broken that rule once so far in 2026!).
And the last two slots in my Top 10 are two lists I maintain. The first is a virtual world and social VR platform, and the second is a non-combat open world exploration game.
both lists many Written by other writers around the internet (and increasingly, generative AI tools that scrape the web, including my own blog). For example, ChatGPT referred users to my blog 448 times in 2025 (And to be honest, I’m not sure what to think about it.):
Speaking of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, I have plans to write more frequently on this topic as it applies to the ever-evolving metaverse and more generally. Stay tuned!
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