State of the Mobile Web, February 2012

March Mobile Madness

Every March, the eyes of the U.S. sports world are fixed on the college basketball (NCAA) national championships. It’s a special time of the year known as “March Madness”.

From March 15, every Thursday through Sunday there are multiple games going on in the tournament. Especially during the opening rounds of the single-elimination tournament, many games are on simultaneously. The tournament starts out with a whooping 64 teams, that gradually drop off until you have the nail-biter rounds known as “Sweet 26” and “Final Four”.

It’s hard to follow all the action, so we figured people probably turn to their mobile devices to help. To find out, we set up a small experiment. Looking at the top sports sites for Opera Mini traffic, we determined a baseline long weekend (February 16-19) and then looked at the run-up to the opening round (March 11-14), as well as the first-round weekend (March 15-18). The results are pretty dramatic!

When looking into the team-specific data accumulated from the increase of surf on b-ball sites, we found some interesting factoids:

• Syracuse is by far the most popular team in the tournament, according to page view data in Opera Mini.
• We tried our hand at predicting the outcome of the games by comparing the page-view data for each team’s home page. In the “Sweet 16” round‚ our methodology accurately revealed the winner in 7 of 8 games.
• But, you still won’t see us in Vegas for the Final Four. In the Elite 8 round, our methodology revealed just one winner from the four games. This is an indicator that web popularity isn’t necessarily correlated with placements in the tournament.

Part 2: Growth

In February 2012, the Opera Mini browser saw increases in unique users, page views and data consumed. In all, 160 million people used the Opera Mini browser in February, 108 billion pages were served and more than 19 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users.

Number of users

In February 2012, there were over 160 million Opera Mini users, a 0.62% increase from January 2012. The lower than usual percent increase is due to the lower number of days in the month of February. Since February 2011, the number of unique users has increased 78.17%.

Pages transcoded

In February 2012, Opera Mini users generated over 1,917 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since January, the data consumed went up by 4.69%. Data in the Opera Mini browser is compressed by up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 19.18 petabytes of data in February. Since February 2011, data traffic is up 142.79%.

Month	Page views
February 2012	108,322,127,981
January 2012	108,711,984,250
December 2011	103,156,318,112
November 2011	88,516,536,629
October 2011	86,241,891,002
September 2011	79,164,254,190
August 2011	79,594,255,478
July 2011	74,078,891,600
June 2011	67,303,912,324
May 2011	63,386,735,162
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

Data consumed

In February 2012, Opera Mini users generated over 1,917 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since January, the data consumed went up by 4.69%. Data in the Opera Mini browser is compressed by up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 19.18 petabytes of data in February. Since February 2011, data traffic is up 142.79%.

Month	Data transfer (MB)
February 2012	1,916,961,696
January 2012	1,831,047,506
December 2011	1,663,600,099
November 2011	1,421,897,839
October 2011	1,360,336,480
September 2011	1,251,149,418
August 2011	1,232,303,979
July 2011	1,170,603,288
June 2011	1,068,360,258
May 2011	1,031,183,476
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