(I originally posted this for the Opera Watch site, but since I wrote it I might as well post it here as well.)
Opera Mini’s usage statistics for the First Quarter of 2008 are in and they look promising!
Opera’s first “State of the Mobile Web” report is broken down into several sections, one of which covers “Top Trends”. According to the report, social networking sites claim nearly 40% of all traffic worldwide!
In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.
Since the birth of Opera Mini in 2005 and the public release in January of 2006, Opera Mini’s user base has grown to over 44 million users worldwide and continues to grow strong. This incredible growth means that the number of Opera Mini users have increased 26% since the last quarter in 2007!
Opera Mini cumulative users per month
With over 2.4 billion page views in March alone, Opera Mini users consumed more than 33 million MB of data! That’s a 57% increase in page views and almost an 88% increase in data transferred when compared to the last quarter of 2007!
Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month (left) and total data consumed per month in MB (right).
Content Preferences
By examining aggregate numbers, we are able to paint a picture of the types of sites and services that win on the mobile Web. Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:
- Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
- Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
- Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
- Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.
For a complete break down of the top 10 countries and top 10 most visited sites per country, navigate over to the State of the Mobile Web: First Quarter, 2008 report!
Top 10 sites in the U.S.
- www.myspace.com
- www.google.com
- www.mocospace.com
- www.yahoo.com
- www.facebook.com
- www.live.com
- www.hi5.com
- www.wikipedia.org
- www.itsmy.com
- www.ebay.com
Countries achieving the top 10 list include: Russia, Indonesia, China, United States, India, South Africa, Ukraine, United Kingdom, Germany and Poland.