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Posts tagged with "state of the mobile web"

200 million mobile users

By Espen André ØverdahlEspenAO. Tuesday, July 31, 2012 10:05:44 PM

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200 million mobile users

Today, Opera reached an important milestone: Two hundred million people use Opera Mini and Opera Mobile to connect to the world. For many users around the world, a browser is more than a tool to ‘browse the web’. Sometimes it's a school when you can afford none, sometimes it's the only line to an outside world shut off by an oppressive regime. By providing a service that reliably and cheaply delivers critical information to just about everyone with a phone is the reason we makes browsers. We want to make a difference in the world, not only on the web.

You can read more about the numbers breakdown in this month's state of the mobile web report.

Thanks everyone for supporting Opera in our mission to make a faster and better Internet experience for all.

Opera Mini

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Opera Users are Mobile Trendsetters

By Anna RohlederAnnaMetro. Wednesday, May 2, 2012 12:08:17 PM

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Quick show of hands: how many of you are reading this on your phone or mobile device?

A new survey we published as part of our State of the Mobile Web series says that more than half of Opera users (56%, to be precise) get online through a mobile device only.

Through a collaboration we did with On Device Research, collecting over 34,000 responses worldwide, we learned that not only are Opera users less likely to use a desktop computer to browse the Internet, but they are also younger and more educated.

(We hope you also drink at least 2 liters of water a day, and wear a seatbelt when you go anywhere by car!)

Here are some of the other key findings:

  • You guys are really mostly guys; only 1 in 5 Opera users is a woman. (This number is a little higher in South Africa and Thailand, however.)
  • While the average age of an Opera user is between 18-24 globally, the typical age goes up to 35+ in Hungary, the Philippines, the United States and Malaysia.
  • In Egypt, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, more Opera users are in higher education or in the workforce than non-Opera users.
  • Opera users all over the world go online longer and more often than those using other mobile browsers. A full 75% of Opera users access the Internet on a daily basis, and in many countries, they spend an hour or more online.

We were also happy to note than more than 168 million unique users were registered on the Opera Mini platform during the month of March, viewing more than 117 billion webpages in the same period.

What about you? How often do you go online from a mobile device? Is there anything you want to do with Opera Mini or Opera Mobile that you would like to see added to the browser in the future? Let us know in the comments!

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This week on the web

By Anna RohlederAnnaMetro. Friday, February 17, 2012 1:03:01 PM

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This week here at Opera HQ, we did some serious number crunching (and by "we" I mean not yours truly, so you can feel confident in the accuracy of the results). In this latest edition of The State of the Mobile Web, some interesting insights emerged around people's mobile browsing habits around the world: Different countries have different patterns to their surfing, and many can be divided into 'weekend surfers' and 'weekday surfers'.

Using anonymous and aggregated data taken from Opera Mini servers, we found that two-thirds of all countries surveyed are more active on the mobile web during weekdays than the weekends.

Typical "weekend countries", in terms of the total number of users, are Egypt, Iran, Ghana, Ethiopia and Tanzania, who top the list of increase in weekend users as compared to weekday users. By contrast, "weekday countries" include Romania, Belarus, Moldova, the United States and Poland, who show the opposite trend on weekend days.

Which kind of country do you live in? And are your browsing habits the same or different from the people around you?

Speaking of Mini, the world said hello to the discovery of some mini reptiles this week, with the discovery of very tiny lizards in Madagascar. Smaller than many tropical insects, the micro-sized chameleons inhabit the leaf litter of the forest floor. And while "leaf litter on the forest floor" in itself sounds like a lost line to "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe, "nevermore" as an ending would be sadly appropriate... The species' new scientific names contain references to the imminent disappearance of their habitat.

Well, I'd hate to leave you all on a down note, so let's wrap up with some more positive news. First of all: a fluffy floor mop of a Pekingese took this year's top spot at the Westminster Dog Show. Apart from that, there were more ACTA protests, the rumor mill pegged early March as the release date of the iPad3, Facebook decided that famous people don't have to use their real nameson the popular social networking site...Where will it end? Could they also be allowed to use not-real photos of themselves too??

Have a great weekend, everyone!

smile

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We are predicting a win for the New England Patriots over the NY Giants

By Espen André ØverdahlEspenAO. Tuesday, January 31, 2012 7:16:51 PM

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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.

31 comments

This week on the web

By Anna RohlederAnnaMetro. Friday, December 23, 2011 8:41:50 AM

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If years are like films, then end-of-year wrap ups must be something like the credits. Here at Opera, we compiled our own year in review - in this case as part of our monthly State of the Mobile Web series.

Usually these are snapshots of specific trends, but for our last report of the year, we took a look at the most popular websites for Opera Mini users over the last 11 months. Drumroll, please!

  1. google.com
  2. facebook.com
  3. youtube.com (up 1 from 2010)
  4. vkontakte.ru (down 1 from 2010)
  5. odnoklassniki.ru
  6. yandex.ru
  7. wikipedia.org (up 4 from 2010)
  8. my.opera.com
  9. yahoo.com (down 2 from 2010)
  10. twitter.com (up 2 from 2010)

In November 2011, there were over 144.6 million Opera Mini users. Since that same time last year, the number of unique users on Opera Mini has increased 80.6%. If you are reading this on your mobile device, you're part of this great growth story. yes

Meanwhile, YouTube announced its top 10 videos of the year. The list was almost evenly split between talking (dogs, babies) and singing (everyone else), thereby highlighting the essential point that video without audio is just - well - pictures.

Speaking of images, 2011 certainly had its share of memorable moments. One might even say it was chock-a-block with big stories. So it's probably only logical that some enterprising folks over at The Guardian newspaper in the UK organized a group of creative (and patient!) people through Flickr to put together the top news stories of the year in Lego. (Where did they get those sets??)

Finally, for those of you celebrating Christmas, here's hoping Santa will be good to you! For everyone else, enjoy the quiet time as the year winds down, and thanks to all of you for supporting Opera. Have a great weekend!

wink

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