Mobile web use, more intensive - Opera report

OSLO, NORWAY: Opera's State of the Mobile Web report for July 2009 examines the link between downloads and usage in determining some of the places Opera Mini users might vacation during the summer. The report, published monthly, provides information on global trends affecting the mobile web.

The full report is available from http://www.opera.com/smw. In addition to the top global trends, country snapshots, the report highlights trends in the Middle East, including the recent Iranian elections.

Global trends

In July 2009, nearly 29.1 million people used Opera Mini, a 9.9% increase from June 2009 and more than 145% compared to July 2008. These numbers reflect only the Opera Mini users who have specifically chosen to install the browser on their phone.
Those 29.1 million people viewed more than 12 billion pages in July 2009. Since June, page views have gone up 15.4%. Since July 2008, page views have increased 223%.
Opera Mini users last month generated nearly 187 million megabytes of data for operators worldwide. Since June, the data consumed went up by 11%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 1.7 PB of data in July. Since July 2008, data traffic is up 223%.
The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage are (in order): Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, Nigeria, Germany and Poland.

Snapshot: South Africa

Page-view growth since July 2008: 386.3%
Unique-user growth since July 2008: 84.4%
Page-views per user: 350

Top 10 sites in South Africa (# of unique users): facebook.com, google.com, wikipedia.org, my.opera.com, mxit.com, yahoo.com, zamob.com, gmail.com, peperonity.com, twitter.com

Snapshot: Nigeria

Page-view growth since July 2008: 4,905.3%
Unique-user growth since July 2008: 1,733.7%
Page-views per user: 358
Last month, Facebook passed Yahoo!. This month, Facebook moved ahead of Google to take the number one spot.

Top 10 sites in Nigeria (# of unique users): facebook.com, google.com, yahoo.com, bbc.co.uk, cnnmobile.com, goal.com, wikipedia.org, sharemobile.ro, myspace.com, getjar.com.

Browsing on vacation?

Locations in July where Opera Mini users appear to vacation include Turkmenistan, Antarctica, Aruba, Andorra, Burundi and Australia. In these locations, unique users increased more than the download rate.

"This month's report shows that people are using the mobile web more intensively, said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "We believe that giving people everywhere a better browser will encourage them to browse more. So if we want the web to be available to everyone, we need a solution that can work on almost every phone. That was why we originally made Opera Mini. And so far, the world has responded. We continue to be humbled by that response."

View the State of the Mobile Report archive at http://www.opera.com/smw/archive/.