I was curious this morning, so I went into WordPress and checked out my blog viewer statistics. I used to check them much more frequently during the heady heyday of the metaverse boom-and-bust, circa 2019 to 2022, when traffic to my blog surged to unprecedented levels and then crashed, as shown by a screenshot I took of my WordPress statistics last March:
One notable event during that time period was Facebook rebranding itself as Meta on October 28th, 2021, amid Mark Zuckerberg’s expensive push to transform his company into a metaverse powerhouse (with somewhat mixed but still undeniable success, notably on the hardware side, with its Quest line of wireless VR/AR headsets).
Then, in 2022, the hype cycle for artificial intelligence started, an unexpected surge of interest driven by a tidal wave of new, generative AI tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT, and the world seemed to move on—as seen by a noticeable decline in visitors to the RyanSchultz.com blog! (It also didn’t help that through most of 2024 and 2025, I was swamped at my paying job as an academic librarian, having to put my blog on hiatus for a while as I went on half-time sick leave for six months for treatment of burnout. As a result, I barely posted anything during most of 2025.)
Anyway, as I said previously, I was curious, so I checked to see what my top ten 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 blogposts receive: the relatively rare ones where I write about sexual topics! Let me be clear: while I am not a prude, I am also not that terribly interested in writing about adult/sex-oriented metaverse platforms, because I find pixelsex boring. Therefore, I will leave that particular niche of the metaverse to others to chronicle. 😉
Anyway, 2025 was no exception to the rule, with three of my top ten most popular bloposts being about such adult topics (by the way, all three links are quite safe for work):
Which just goes to prove the old adage: sex sells. Or, at least, that there’s lots of people searching for sex on the internet. (I really should rent out prime advertising space on that sex-in-VRChat blog post; I bet I’d make some income off that! Even though I freely admit in that blogpost that I have absolutely no idea where the sex is in VRChat. Sorry, folks. 😂😆🤣)
In the number two slot is the count of people who just went straight to my homepage at https://ryanschultz.com, without clicking on a link to specific blogpost. No surprise there.
My coverage of the many changes in Second Life during 2025 (most notably, the new Avatar Welcome Kit with its LeLutka Lite heads and Legacy Basic bodies) takes up four of the top ten spots:
And, as I have said previously, I”m cutting back on my Second Life coverage (even though Ihave already broken that rule once so far in 2026!).
And the final 2 slots in my Top Ten are the two lists I maintain, the first of virtual worlds and social VR platforms, and the second of non-combat, open-world exploration games.
Both lists seem to be referred to a lot by other writers on the internet (and, increasingly, by generative AI tools which scrape the web, including my blog). For example, ChatGPT has referred its users to my blog 448 times in 2025 (and, to be honest, I’m not quite sure how to feel about that):
Speaking of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools, I do have plans to write more often on this topic, both as it applies to the ever-evolving metaverse, and more generally as well. Stay tuned!
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