Opera

Hello and welcome to the first State of the Mobile Web for 2009. Despite the gloomy economic news, I hope you all enjoyed warm and relaxing holidays.

Each State of the Mobile Web report presents the previous month's data, so this month we have a special report that not only looks back on what was, but presents some thoughts of ours about where the mobile Web will go in 2009.

Our first report in May looked at social networking. It was clear then that sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, vKontakte and others drove a substantial amount of traffic over our Opera Mini servers. In subsequent reports, in different countries around the world, we saw similar results.

We return to the social Web for part of our 2008 Year-in-Review. We present some astonishing growth figures of the top social networks in each of our top countries. Did you know Facebook use through Opera Mini grew 4380% in Indonesia alone in 2008? Of course, owing to our strong following in Russia and Russian-speaking countries, vKontakte just edged out Facebook as the most used social network through Opera Mini. Next year it will be interesting to see where 2009 has taken us.

We also include a few predictions, but I'd like to take a risk-free prediction of my own. The mobile Web will continue strong growth in 2009, despite (or perhaps even because of) the world economic conditions. Between substantial room for growth in both developed and developing nations and more unrestricted access to the mobile Web, I expect 2009 will be a strong year.

Thank you for reading. I hope 2009 will be another watershed year for all of us in this industry.

Kind Regards,
Jon S. von Tetzchner
CEO, Opera Software

Part 1: Growth

Number of users

Note: In November, during a regular verification of our Opera Mini statistics, we discovered a technical issue concerning the counting of unique users. We have corrected this issue for our December numbers. Historic figures prior to October 2008 are estimates. We will update the charts as we correct the data set.

In December, Opera Mini was used by approximately 17.8 million users, an 8.6% increase from November 2008.

Pages transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed more than 6.4 billion pages in December. Each person using Opera Mini viewed approximately 360 pages on average. Since November, page views have gone up 13.0%. Since December 2007, this number is up 312%.

Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month

Month	Page views
January 2006	39,969,125
February 2006	70,119,707
March 2006	102,386,928
April 2006	123,915,618
May 2006	155,660,949
June 2006	183,518,205
July 2006	231,325,050
August 2006	268,738,912
September 2006	274,840,901
October 2006	336,044,711
November 2006	378,938,100
December 2006	423,503,600
January 2007	507,622,606
February 2007	540,701,179
March 2007	632,313,886
April 2007	705,063,025
May 2007	767,107,863
June 2007	788,283,659
July 2007	867,208,160
August 2007	907,690,600
September 2007	872,028,768
October 2007	1,192,916,658
November 2007	1,414,205,703
December 2007	1,558,566,188
January 2008	1,787,235,674
February 2008	1,883,751,325
March 2008	2,429,200,080
April 2008	2,491,451,387
May 2008	2,947,979,866
June 2008	3,224,286,622
July 2008	3,736,244,111
August 2008	4,172,941,429
September 2008	4,533,894,901
October 2008	5,088,923,679
November 2008	5,703,580,103
December 2008	6,418,665,392

Data consumed

In December, 17.8 million Opera Mini users generated more than 93.8 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since November, the data consumed went up by 13.2%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed 90% on average. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 938 million MB of data in December. Since December 2007, data traffic is up 366%.

Total data consumed per month (in MB)

Month	Data transfer (MB)
January 2006	587,826
February 2006	759,338
March 2006	1,072,662
April 2006	1,334,715
May 2006	1,831,441
June 2006	2,127,142
July 2006	2,614,633
August 2006	2,979,209
September 2006	2,976,858
October 2006	3,692,282
November 2006	4,124,607
December 2006	4,652,547
January 2007	5,322,457
February 2007	5,573,556
March 2007	6,529,736
April 2007	7,264,413
May 2007	8,093,274
June 2007	7,984,642
July 2007	9,729,792
August 2007	10,379,959
September 2007	9,922,367
October 2007	12,491,633
November 2007	14,732,591
December 2007	20,129,575
January 2008	23,690,372
February 2008	26,521,524
March 2008	33,096,381
April 2008	35,636,188
May 2008	43,095,243
June 2008	46,735,465
July 2008	53,853,102
August 2008	60,399,886
September 2008	65,281,686
October 2008	73,730,827
November 2008	82,972,386
December 2008	93,809,836

Part 2: Country snapshots for December 2008

Part 3: Top social networks in 2008