State of the Mobile Web, April 2011

We live in social times. Never before have people been so interconnected in their private lives — sharing their ideas, opinions and media with friends and strangers alike. This month’s State of the Mobile Web focuses how people use social media on mobile devices. We see that a significant portion of Opera Mini users choose to participate on social networks. Although each country has its own most popular social network, one commonality is that those who frequent such sites use them heavily, as seen in the page-view statistics described in the report.

Happy browsing!

Jon von Tetzchner,
Co-founder, Opera Software

• Measuring social network use in different countries
• Growth
• Country snapshots for April 2011
• Regional spotlight — Commonwealth of Independent States

Part 1: Measuring social network use in different countries

In this month’s special highlight, we answer the following question: “In which countries do users browse social sites the most via their handsets?”

For each country, we regularly rank the top sites visited by Opera Mini users (based on the number of users visiting those sites). Social networking sites often rank highly on such lists. This month, however, we’ve gone a step further, looking at the percentage of users who visit such sites, and the percentage of page views being directed toward those sites.

Methodology

First, for the month of April 2011, we identified the top social network site in each of the top 20 countries. We then calculated the following:

• the percentage of users in each country accessing the top social networking site in that country
• the percentage of each country’s monthly page views being directed toward the most popular page visited on that country’s top social networking site

The 20 countries were ranked according to social browsing page view percentage and social browsing user percentage.

Social media use per country as a percentage of overall mobile web traffic

Part 2: Growth

In April 2011, Opera Mini saw increases in unique users and data consumed. In all, 107.1 million people used Opera Mini in April, 57.9 billion pages were served, and 8.8 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users.

Number of users

In April 2011, Opera Mini had over 107.1 million users, a 4.6% increase from March 2011. Since April 2010, the number of unique users has increased 81.8%.

Pages transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed over 57.9 billion pages in April 2011. Since March, page views have gone down 3.1%. Since April 2010, page views have increased 120.2%.

Month	Page views
April 2011	57,935,683,078
March 2011	59,768,735,532
February 2011	51,531,490,158
January 2011	52,377,317,703
December 2010	46,725,301,390
November 2010	44,652,355,113
October 2010	41,623,101,976
September 2010	36,972,736,551
August 2010	33,923,604,102
July 2010	29,679,113,203
June 2010	27,350,331,025
May 2010	28,325,159,098
April 2010	26,311,685,380
March 2010	25,898,747,364
February 2010	22,055,615,946
January 2010	23,356,863,511
December 2009	20,719,112,062
November 2009	18,814,158,683
October 2009	17,179,459,019
September 2009	14,958,270,625
August 2009	13,949,154,395
July 2009	12,051,716,351
June 2009	10,447,031,428
May 2009	9,641,002,614

Data consumed

In April 2011, Opera Mini users generated over 954 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since March, the data consumed went up by 0.9%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 8.8 petabytes of data in April. Since April 2010, data traffic is up 139.5%.

Month	Data transfer (MB)
April 2011	954,840,197
March 2011	946,210,968
February 2011	790,192,801
January 2011	804,000,878
December 2010	706,327,921
November 2010	677,508,852
October 2010	616,192,761
September 2010	535,337,310
August 2010	489,402,631
July 2010	445,158,599
June 2010	416,406,077
May 2010	433,688,140
April 2010	398,617,291
March 2010	396,171,723
February 2010	330,601,107
January 2010	337,088,690
December 2009	315,150,762
November 2009	285,126,819
October 2009	263,245,795
September 2009	226,990,071
August 2009	208,786,577
July 2009	186,996,258
June 2009	168,483,963
May 2009	159,545,769

Part 3: Country snapshots for April 2011

South Africa passed China in terms of total Opera Mini users in the month of April. Mexico leapt into the top 10, while the United States fell to number 11. Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh and Kenya all went up in the ranking of top 20 countries.

Top 10

Countries 11-20

Part 4: Spotlight on the Commonwealth of Independent States

Top 10 countries snapshot