Topics: Mobile

Opera Says Mobile Web Use Grew 16% In June

Posted by Eric Zeman, Aug 22, 2008 04:10 PM

In its latest "State of the Mobile Web" report, Opera Software details how things shaped up in the month of July. The number of page views jumped, though the mobile Web site rankings remained mostly unchanged in the U.S.

Yep, Google is still the el numero uno destination for users of the mobile Web. In the U.S., the top 10 mobile Web sites were:

1. google.com
2. myspace.com
3. facebook.com
4. wikipedia.org
5. yahoo.com
6. nytimes.com
7. gamejump.com
8. youtube.com (up from 9)
9. accuweather.com (down from 8)
10. my.opera.com

Google isn't just popular in the U.S. Opera took special care to note some of the rankings in Latin American countries. Google is the number one site in Brazil and every other Latin American country, with Google properties YouTube and Orkut also falling in the top 10.

"We're pleased to see such considerable growth and interest in accessing the Web from mobile phones globally," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "But the pace of adoption in Latin America is increasing rapidly. The reasons behind this growth are two-fold. First, consumers are willing to purchase data plans because of the cost savings associated with Opera Mini's data compression. They are able to surf more. Second, 80% of phones in Latin America can support a lightweight Web browser. Giving those consumers a better Web experience helps drive both interest in and adoption of the mobile Web."

What's also noteworthy is that Opera saw some serious gains in mobile Web usage when comparing June to July. In the month of July, Opera Mini was used by approximately 15.8 million users, a 9.4% increase from June. Opera Mini users viewed more than 3.7 billion pages in July. In July, each person using Opera Mini viewed approximately 236 pages on average. Since June, page views have gone up 15.9%.

That's an impressive growth rate. Opera doesn't attribute this growth to anything, but I am sure it has something to do with the fact that the latest version of Opera Mini 4.1 exited beta and became a full release recently.

It would be interesting to compare Opera's numbers with those from the iPhone's Safari browser and Nokia's S60 browser. That would provide a nice snapshot of just how much traction the mobile Web is getting and on what types of devices.

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