Opera forever

After 32 months as head of Opera Software's Consumer Marketing team, I'm now leaving Opera. As part of the new organizational structure, I was offered a new position in another department. I have not accepted the new role and will therefore seek external challenges outside Opera.

Being responsible for growing Opera's user base has been a fantastic experience:

• Number of Opera users grew from 50 to 200 million (from January 2009 to June 2011)
• The My Opera community reached 7 million registered members and Opera now has about 1 million followers on external social networks (including 550,000 Facebook followers and 330,000 on vKontakte)
• The Community Marketing Team has grown and expanded into new markets and regions, including Russia, China, Latin America, Germany, Middle East, Vietnam, Brazil, Indonesia and the English speaking world.

Opera's Marketing Team has some exciting new initiatives in pipeline. It will feel strange not to be in control of all the projects, but the new people taking over responsibilities are among the best talents I ever worked with. New strategies for social media, advertising and ingredient branding are now being implemented; Marketing will continue to grow and shine!

Marketing is hard work, but sometimes also great fun. Some of the most enjoyable memories from my time in Opera are when we managed to make Opera Mini the most popular iPhone app in all markets worldwide without marketing budgets, when our April Fools video from 2009 got copied by Google or when we decided to copy Google Chrome's speed test video with our own Potato Speed Test version and got 1.3 million YouTube views. It was also amazing to see the online community power when a single blog post about Oprah Winfrey made headlines around the World or to experience how the community got engaged when we gave them control of our own recruitment process.

I started using Opera in the nineties and I have always been a huge fan of the most user friendly, the fastest and the most powerful Web browser available. I will continue to let Opera improve my web experience.

Opera forever!