Opera Software ASA

A look at Super Bowl 2012

In this State of the Mobile Web report, in addition to presenting the Opera Mini usage numbers for December 2011, we take a look at the mobile-surfing habits during the NFL playoffs to see if the popularity of a team can affect the outcome of the matches.

Will the most popular team win? Using aggregated and anynomous data from the Opera Mini servers, we had go at the statistics.

This small study started by our hypothesizing that we could predict the winner of the NFL playoff games based upon Opera Mini traffic to the involved team’s websites.

There were eight teams that went to the Divisional playoff rounds played on the 14th and 15th of January. We counted unique users to the eight sites (actually 16 including the “m” or mobile version sites) from 9th through 13th of January. Based on these counts, we predicted the winners of the games to be:

• New England Patriots over the Denver Broncos
• San Francisco 49ers over the New Orleans Saints
• Green Bay Packers over the New York Giants
• The Baltimore Ravens over the The Houston Texans

In the initial rounds of analysis, we successfully picked three of the four winners, missing that the NY Giants would beat the Green Bay Packers.

To keep testing, we kept our hypothesis and moved to the Conference round. We again took the week prior to that of the 16th January to 21st January and counted active users in the time period for each of the team websites. Based on this analysis, we predicted the game winners to be:

• New England Patriots over the Baltimore Ravens
• New York Giants over the San Francisco 49ers

We were correct on both games, causing celebration, awkward office high fives for all and a general feeling of redemption.

This brings us to the Super Bowl prediction for next Sunday, the 5th of February. Without the ability to run this through two weeks, we looked at usage from the 22nd Jan through Friday the 27th of January.

From this, we are predicting a win for the New England Patriots over the NY Giants.

This is, of course, based just on popularity of the teams on the Web as measured by our servers, but we like to think that some home field advantage comes into play with the most support.

After American-Football-crazy USA, we saw the most usage from Mexico, the United Kingdom, India, Canada, Brazil, Germany, Hungary, South African and Nigeria.

(Using the same methodology described above, India, Canada and Germany are picking the Giants to win.)

Part 2: Growth

In December 2011, the Opera Mini browser saw increases in unique users, page views and data consumed. In all, 152.6 million people used the Opera Mini browser in December, 103.15 billion pages were served and 14.9 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users.

Number of users

In December 2011, there were over 152.6 million Opera Mini users, a 5.57% increase from November 2011. Since December 2010, the number of unique users has increased 78.45%.

Pages transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed over 103.1 billion pages in December 2011. Since November, page views have gone up 16.5%. Since December 2010, page views have increased 120.7%.

Month	Page views
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
February 2010	22,055,615,946
January 2010	23,356,863,511

Data consumed

In December 2011, Opera Mini users generated over 1,663 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since November, the data consumed went up by 17%. Data in the Opera Mini browser is compressed by up to 90%. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 14.9 petabytes of data in December. Since December 2010, data traffic is up 135.5%.

Month	Data transfer (MB)
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
February 2010	330,601,107
January 2010	337,088,690