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
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
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.
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.
- www.myspace.com
- www.google.com
- www.mocospace.com
- www.yahoo.com
- www.facebook.com
- www.live.com
- www.hi5.com
- www.wikipedia.org
- www.itsmy.com
- www.ebay.com