Opera Software ASA

Why the State of the Mobile Web is more than just the state of browsing on smartphones

For this month’s State of the Mobile Web Report, we’ve decided to change things up a bit, adopting a slightly different perspective to examine Opera Mini and its role in the evolution of mobile browsing.

For nearly 3 and a half years, based on our analysis of Opera Mini usage, we’ve been sharing our insights on how people around the world browse the Web on their handsets. Since our first report in 2008, however, the landscape has changed considerably. Mobile Internet access has become increasingly ubiquitous, and excitement over the latest and greatest smartphones has come to dominate technology headlines.

Despite the fact that Opera Mini was not designed to be a smartphone browser (that’s what Opera Mobile is for), many smartphone users do, in fact, use it, as do even more non-smartphone users.

The cutting edge devices get most of the attention, but the full story is no less important. Opera Mini has provided the means for a huge number of people to browse the Web for the first time, and many users around the world browse the Web primarily via Opera Mini on their handsets (as opposed to a desktop browser)¹. In fact, for the first time, more than 20 countries in the world have at least 1 million people using Opera Mini every month².

Below is the list of 22 countries where Opera Mini is used by 1 million or more people, presented in the order that each country passed the 1 million mark and when that happened. Half of the countries with more than 1 million Opera Mini monthly users passed that milestone in 2011:

Country	Date reaching 1 million users
Russia	March 2007
Indonesia	March 2008
India	May 2008
Ukraine	September 2008
United States	December 2008
China	February 2009
South Africa	June 2009
Nigeria	January 2010
Vietnam	March 2010
Brazil	October 2010
Belarus	December 2010
United Kingdom	January 2011
Mexico	March 2011
Philippines	March 2011
Kazakhstan	March 2011
Egypt	March 2011
Turkey	April 2011
Bangladesh	April 2011
Kenya	June 2011
Pakistan	July 2011
Poland	July 2011
Uzbekistan	July 2011

While we normally present month-to-month growth numbers and year-on-year growth percentages, the short-term changes don’t fully illustrate Opera Mini’s tremendous growth. Looking over our historical data, starting in January 2006, the number of Opera Mini users actually doubled a total of 8 times. In January 2006, there were 400,000 unique users of Opera Mini. October 2011 marks the 8th time Opera Mini usage has doubled since then.

The number of monthly Opera Mini users has swelled to over 140 million unique users in October. As seen in the list above, much of this growth has taken place in countries like Russia, Indonesia, India, China and Brazil — countries where wired Internet penetration³ still has a long way to go and where (in some cases) handset usage⁴ already dwarfs what we see in the United States and Western Europe.

When mobile browsing becomes so commonplace that websites are designed for mobile first and desktop second, perhaps those who grew up using Opera Mini (as a common way to access the Internet) in countries like Indonesia and Ukraine will lead the way in terms of small screen web development and user interface design. Indeed, we believe that the mobile Web will and should be increasingly global in its evolution.

1. State of the Mobile Web report, October 2010
2. Opera Software: Third quarter 2011 (PDF)
3. List of Internet users by country (Wikipedia)
4. List of countries by number of mobile phones in use (Wikipedia)

Part 2: Growth

In October 2011, the Opera Mini browser saw increases in unique users, page views and data consumed. In all, 140 million people used the Opera Mini browser in October, 86.2 billion pages were served and 12.7 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users.

Number of users

In October 2011, there were over 140 million Opera Mini users, a 6.6% increase from September 2011. Since October 2010, the number of unique users has increased 83.4%.

Pages transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed over 86.2 billion pages in October 2011. Since September, page views have gone up 8.9%. Since October 2010, page views have increased 107.2%.

Month	Page views
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
February 2010	22,055,615,946
January 2010	23,356,863,511
December 2009	20,719,112,062
November 2009	18,814,158,683

Data consumed

In October 2011, Opera Mini users generated over 1,360 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since September, the data consumed went up by 8.7%. Data in the Opera Mini browser is compressed by up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 12.7 petabytes of data in October. Since October 2010, data traffic is up 120.8%.

Month	Data transfer (MB)
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
February 2010	330,601,107
January 2010	337,088,690
December 2009	315,150,762
November 2009	285,126,819