Opera News

In the latest State of the Mobile Web report, in addition to presenting the Opera Mini usage numbers for December 2011, we take a look at the mobile-surfing habits during the NFL playoffs to see if the popularity of a team can affect the outcome of the matches.

Will the most popular team win? Using aggregated and anynomous data from the Opera Mini servers, we had go at the statistics.

This small study started by our hypothesizing that we could predict the winner of the NFL playoff games based upon Opera Mini traffic to the involved team’s websites.

There were eight teams that went to the Divisional playoff rounds played on the 14th and 15th of January. We counted unique users to the eight sites (actually 16 including the “m” or mobile version sites) from 9th through 13th of January. Based on these counts, we predicted the winners of the games to be:

• New England Patriots (Win) over the Denver Broncos
• San Francisco 49ers (Win) over the New Orleans Saints
• Green Bay Packers over the New York Giants (Win)
• The Baltimore Ravens (Win) over the The Houston Texans

In the initial rounds of analysis, we successfully picked three of the four winners, missing that the NY Giants would beat the Green Bay Packers.

To keep testing, we kept our hypothesis and moved to the Conference round. We again took the week prior to that of the 16th January to 21st January and counted active users in the time period for each of the team websites. Based on this analysis, we predicted the game winners to be:

• New England Patriots (Win) over the Baltimore Ravens
• New York Giants (Win) over the San Francisco 49ers

We were correct on both games, causing celebration, awkward office high fives for all and a general feeling of redemption.

This brings us to the Super Bowl prediction for next Sunday, the 5th of February. Without the ability to run this through two weeks, we looked at usage from the 22nd Jan through Friday the 27th of January.

From this, we are predicting a win for the New England Patriots over the NY Giants.