Kitely region growth and blog posts

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Dot Matrix
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Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Dot Matrix »

In a post summarising the Kitely results from Hypergrid Business's June 2015 statistics report, I included a chart illustrating the growth in region numbers on Kitely over time, compiled from the grid data Maria publishes each month.

Here's the chart again, for reference.
Image
The general trend is a mostly steady growth. The region numbers dip in only two months out of the four+ years shown here, and they grow faster in some periods, slower in others.

What might be behind the changes in numbers? I thought it might be interesting to see what was reported on the Kitely blog at the times the trend seems to change, referring to Documentation: Contents of Kitely's blog posts. So here comes a load of speculation based on eyeballing the chart!

Statistics are first reported from April 2011. Region numbers show a steady growth to January 2012, but then they dip slightly in February 2012.
April 2011: Welcome to Kitely
3 February 2012: Billing system finally in place

Growth resumes after this, with a sharper increase in September 2012 -- was this the result of the introduction of Advanced Megaregions?
17 August 2012: High-Performance Big Worlds, and World Pictures

The region numbers continue to grow after this, though the pace of growth seems to tail off slightly from November 2012 to January 2013, even after the announcement of fixed-price worlds for the first time in Kitely.
3 October 2012: Unmetered Regions for $40 / Month. (Much Less for Bigger Worlds!)

The pace of growth increasingly picks up from February 2013, after the initial announcement of the Kitely Market early-bird promotion and subsequent Market-related blog posts.
20 January 2013: Kitely Market Early Bird Promotion

There's a bigger than usual increase in July 2013. Was this the result of enabling the Export permission for Market items, or was it because merchants could for the first time browse their own stores?
12 June 2013: Export Permission Implemented
28 June 2013: Kitely Market Merchants Can Now Browse Their Own Stores

Steady growth resumes after that, until a jump in numbers in January 2014 (the result of people taking advantage of grandfathered Silver and Gold plans?) and a subsequent slowdown after that, with region numbers even dipping for only the second time in Kitely's history in May 2014.
13 December 2013: Upcoming Plan Changes and a Limited Time Offer
January 2014: New Fixed-Price Options, Starting at $14.95 / Month

Growth resumed in June 2014. Two major changes happened around this time.
19 May 2014: Kitely Now Supports the Hypergrid, with Strong Content Protections
11 June 2014: Removing Metered Worlds and Introducing Premium Worlds

Region number growth remains steady until May 2015, then sharply increases in May (the limited-time offer of a grandfathered Gold Plan?) and June (the new plans).
3 May 2015: Phasing Out Premium Accounts, and a Limited-Time Offer
1 June 2015: 60% Off Large Worlds, and Dedicated Memory Guarantee
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Carlos Loff »

Kitely Regions count does not reflect the actual regions users because even the starter regions from people who signed up 1 year ago and never showed up again, are still counting, and since those regions do not activate with visits they are not a server burden like in other grids that have to shut down the unused ones for server savings

But apart from that I believe Kitely is growing slowly and steady - Active users count shows that - and Im investing all my time and building effort in Kitely so LONG LIFE TO KITELYYYYYYY
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Serene Jewell »

Hey, that is some nice analyticalizing there, Dot! Very clever to tie blog announcements to changes in the chart. That sharp increase in April and May of this year is very nice! Curious to see what the next months will bring.

I wonder if there are some SL related events that could be indicated also. Thinking specifically of when the educator discount was announced. And the TOS changes, though that was more of a slow burn as people realized they really weren't going to fix it.

Interesting question Carlos raises. Are those new account test worlds counted after the test period has ended?
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Dot Matrix »

Serene Jewell wrote:Are those new account test worlds counted after the test period has ended?
I think they are counted.

As for linking trends with events in other worlds/grids, I did wonder whether to do just that (for example, the slight increase here when OSgrid went down last summer, and the SL ToS controversy), but decided instead to keep the analysis focused on Kitely blogposts.

Edited to add: Looking at Tyche Shepherd's excellent SL gridsurvey data, the number of private regions on 17 April 2011 was 24555. The latest survey (dated 21 June 2015) reports 18298 private regions. That is a loss of 6257 private regions in just over four years; in other words, 25% of the SL private region land area has disappeared since April 2011.
Last edited by Dot Matrix on Tue Jun 23, 2015 4:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Hi Carlos,

We count all worlds that haven't been deleted. While there are definitely people who create trial worlds and abandon their account without deleting them, there are quite a few people who delete their worlds when they decide they don't intend to use Kitely anymore (some of these people even contact us to request that we delete their entire account).

We have more than 38000 registered users. A segnficant number of those people created a free world but the number of regions we currently host is less than 8500 regions. When you consider that many people have multiple Kitely worlds and worlds with multiple regions (i.e. regions which get automatically deleted within 60 days of when people stop paying for them) you can see that the number of unused hosted regions isn't as substantial as you may think. It is also worth mentioning that quite a few people return to Kitely after not having used their world for a while (sometimes for years) so "unused" is often a temporary trait.
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Carlos Loff »

Yep, but anyway for me the most important for Kiteky is guaranteed - Competence, Credibility and Steady Growth

Kitely Market is unbeatable and everyone sooner or later has to come down to it

I wonder if there is a way to have some post on HB about a misconception around Kitely and than gather many more new users, i will explain - On others grids, and more than once, I heard people saying they think Kitely regions only are up if the owners are on their land and otherwise visitors can not even enter those regions

I had to explain them how that works and since that happened more than once i believe that having some way to brake that spell will help growth, even more

People are finding out that the cheapest not always are the right ones and a very well balanced relation price=service is the way to go
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Ilan Tochner »

I agree there is a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being circulated about Kitely. It has been my experience that Maria Korolov (of Hypergrid Business) is open to publishing news about grids but is a lot less inclined to publish third-party opinion pieces (even if they are grounded in facts). So, while I'd love to see her publish such an article :-), I doubt that she will.
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Carlos Loff »

Ilan Tochner wrote:I agree there is a lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) being circulated about Kitely. It has been my experience that Maria Korolov (of Hypergrid Business) is open to publishing news about grids but is a lot less inclined to publish third-party opinion pieces (even if they are grounded in facts). So, while I'd love to see her publish such an article :-), I doubt that she will.
As soon as my Lisbon gets decently started with a coherent built area I will send her again a press release and as she did in the past, when I sent my crowdfund mentioning Kitely as the platform to go, I hope she publishes it and of course I will explain why I have chosen Kitely, insisting again on the advantages of your server saving system

That post about my crowdfund on HB even deployed some comments about another grid invitation and my polite refusal and Maria also agreed with Me why Kitely was a safer promising Grid to use, she is a fan, lol

Here is the http://www.hypergridbusiness.com/2015/0 ... y-replica/
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Re: Kitely region growth and blog posts

Post by Ilan Tochner »

Thank you Carlos :-)
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