We all know the Mobile web is exploding in popularity. Opera Mini, Opera’s mobile browser, grew its monthly users by 11 percent to nearly 40 million users in October from 32 million users in August. In terms of page views, Opera Mini delivered 17.2 billion last month, a 238 percent annual increase, indicating that mobile web usage is growing fast. Since September’s report, page-views have gone up by nearly 15 percent.
Opera also reported increased data consumption on its mobile browsers, which compresses up to 90% of the data to save network bandwidth, with Mini users generating more than 263 million MB of data for operators worldwide in October 2009, a 16 percent increase in data consumption since September 2009. Since October 2008, data traffic is up 233 percent.
Although these stats are impressive, it’s important to acknowledge the immense popularity of Webkit and Apple’s Safari Browser. But Opera Mini does seem to have a stronghold in Russia, Asia and Europe. The top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage are (in order): Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, United States, United Kingdom, Poland and Vietnam.
From October 2008 to October 2009, overall page-views in these countries listed increased by 332 percent, but Opera released some interesting statistics about usage in Latin America in this month’s State of the Browser report. Brazil, Mexico and Argentina lead the countries with the most usage in Latin America.
Unsurprisingly, Google and Facebook are doing well in Latin America, according to the report. While Orkut is strong in Brazil and Paraguay, Facebook is slowly chipping away at its stronghold. Hotmail is the most popular e-mail site in Latin America and Auction site MercadoLibre, eBay’s Latin American partner, is drawing large amounts of users in Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia and Peru. And Nokia and Sony Ericsson are by far the most popular handset brands chosen by Opera Mini users in Latin America.
Opera claims that using Opera Mini saves people “billions of dollars every year off their mobile phone bills” because the browser compresses data by up to 90%, which could reduce the amount users pay each month for mobile data. To promote these savings, Opera is launching a new cost savings calculator to let users figure out how much they could save each month. Opera claims that Mini users save a total of $9.4 billion USD per year.
It’s important to take this number with a grain of salt. Opera’s complex calculations look at the top operators in each country, and determine how much they typically charge per MB of browsing, and averaged those figures together. The average cost of browsing in each country is then multiplied by the amount of traffic generated in each country, and the resulting totals are summed and compared to the totals for uncompressed data traffic. The caveat is that Opera’s calculations reflects metered rates (cost per MB) and not flat-rate subscription options, which skews the numbers in their favor.
Focusing on south east asia, none of the big players have penetrate through the market except Yahoo. Heard rumors next year big vendors and investors will go in, but then again the market is really hard to tame.
Should be interesting.
Hola,soy de Argentina. Me alegra que opera mini destaque a mi pais en el uso de su aplicacion.yo por mi parte doy mucha difusion de opera mini en mi blog y donde sea. Lo unico malo que veo es que no sea de codigo abierto,si este si fuera no habria una atrazo tecnologico,avanzaria mucho mas rapido.es mi opinion personal
Aisa is by all means a large market due to deep penetration of mobiles and high population. No doubt if you are highly successful in asia them numbers are in your favour.
Mobile web is so awesome!!…it really is increasing by no leaps and bounds…
Sarah
http://www.isopurewater.com/
Mobile Internet will continue to explode is usage, especially as Android usage expands and new applications are written on it.
admin
http;//invetrics.com
Google seems be be set in leading the mobile space now, with Droid and Admob.
Go google!
What Opera’s figures do not take into account is that many of those pages they serve up are accessed via Wifi networks. On my mobile phone I use Opera Mini for all my web browsing but (because of my phone company’s download rates) I never access a page over my mobile network, only over a wifi network.
if they’re so many opera mobile/mini users in the wild, how does this data add into the ones you guys posted not too stating that the iphone has over 50% of webusage?
Australian mobile companies need to improve the deals for mobile web usage to increase at the same level it is in the rest of the world.