Social Networking Tops, Says Opera Mobile

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Opera has released a new report on mobile web usage, State of the Mobile Web: First Quarter, 2008 and social networking is a top dras. Almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic.

One Web will triumph over WAP content
Full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. Content on WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23% of mobile Web traffic. This share continues to decline as more consumers both use Opera Mini to access rich Web content and become more comfortable browsing the Web on their phones.

Part 1: Growth

Opera Mini cumulative users per month
Opera Mini cumulative users per month


Cumulative Users

Opera Mini has become the world's most popular mobile browser. Since its worldwide launch in 2006, more than 44 million people have downloaded and used Opera Mini. More than 11.9 million people used Opera Mini in March 2008. In the last quarter, the number of people who downloaded and used Opera Mini grew 26% over the prior quarter in 2007.


Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month
Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month


Pages Transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed more than 2.4 billion pages in March. In the first three months of 2008, the number of pages viewed through Opera Mini grew almost 57% over the last quarter of 2007. In March, each person using Opera Mini viewed 202 pages on average.

Total data consumed per month (in MB)
Total data consumed per month (in MB)


Data Consumed

As the content available to mobile phones improves, data consumption increases. Last month, those 11.9 million Opera Mini users generated more than 33 million MB of data for operators worldwide. This represents an almost 88% growth over the previous quarter.

About the Report & Methodology

When Opera Mini users connect to the Web, their page requests are processed through a secured server. These servers are located in several countries across the globe in order to improve throughput and ensure that Web surfers get their pages lightning fast and without forcing the phone to process the page. Information contained in this report is based on aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers. The security and privacy of people who use Opera Mini is of paramount importance and we safeguard the trust they give us.

Countries selected for this report are the top 10 Opera Mini countries by usage. Subsequent reports will include updates for these countries as well as different regions around the world.

Part 2: Content Preferences

By examining aggregate numbers, we are able to paint a picture of the types of sites and services that win on the mobile Web. Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:

  • Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
  • Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
  • Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
  • Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.


10 Top sites in the U.S.

United States
  1. www.myspace.com
  2. www.google.com
  3. www.mocospace.com
  4. www.yahoo.com
  5. www.facebook.com
  6. www.live.com
  7. www.hi5.com
  8. www.wikipedia.org
  9. www.itsmy.com
  10. www.ebay.com

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