State of the Mobile Web, June 2010 July 28, 2010

From June to July, most of the television-viewing world tuned in to the 2010 FIFA World Cup. Most commentators praised host South Africa’s handling of the most famous and logistically-demanding sporting event this year. To celebrate this occasion, we welcome you to the State of the Mobile Web Report, World Cup edition.

To commemorate this quadrennial milestone, we held the first-ever Opera Mini Mobile Web World Cup. Beginning with the same initial knock-out bracket as in this year's 2010 FIFA World Cup, we used per capita mobile browsing figures to determine the match winners. Our results were quite different from the real games, with Chile and Argentina advancing to the final match. Chile squeezed by Argentina by just 4.1 pages-per-user on that day to win. Congratulations to one of South America's most connected countries.

In keeping with our theme, Part 4 explores the top sport sites for our top countries. As you might expect, there is a healthy mix of local sites along with global sites like FIFA.com.

This report also shines a light, naturally, on Africa, where South Africa stands as the continent’s number one country for mobile web usage. Across Africa, the mobile web boom is well-documented. Our numbers provide support to that message: page views in the top 12 countries in Africa increased by 182%, unique users increased by 124%, and the amount of data transferred increased by 160% in the past year.

Beyond the numbers, we see that access to the Web is reshaping the economic, political and social development of the continent. That many millions do this through a mobile phone is gratifying, and I am both honored and humbled that our browser has a part to play in this revolution.

Happy browsing,

Jon S. von Tetzchner Co-founder, Opera Software

© Copyright 2010, Opera Software ASA, All rights reserved. 1 Highlights ■ As shown in Part 1 of the report, Opera Mini saw a slight decrease in unique users, pages viewed and data consumed in June 2010. In all, 59.4 million people used Opera Mini in June, 27.3 billion pages were served and 3.8 petabytes of operator data were compressed for Opera Mini users. ■ As seen in Part 2 of the report, Ukraine, South Africa, the United States and Vietnam all rose one position on the list of top ten countries (number of Opera Mini users), while Nigeria dropped from position 5 to position 9 on that list. ■ In Part 3 of this month’s report, we look at countries in Africa. The top 12 countries using Opera Mini in that region are South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Egypt, Ghana, Sudan, Libya, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Namibia, Mozambique and Mauritius. ■ Some numbers: From June 2009 to June 2010, page views in the top 12 countries in Africa increased by 182%, unique users increased by 124%, and the amount of data transferred increased by 160% ■ Growth rates in Africa: Sudan and Ghana lead the top 12 countries of the region in terms of page-view growth (4,645.6% and 916.5%, respectively). Sudan and Ghana also lead the top 12 countries of the region in growth of unique users (1,225.0% and 498.8%, respectively). Kenya leads the top 12 countries of the region in page views per user, with each user browsing 639 pages on average each month. ■ Facebook, Google and YouTube all do well in Africa. Facebook is the top-ranked site in six of the twelve listed countries, and Google is ranked #1 in the remaining six countries. ■ Nokia remains the most popular handset brand in Africa, followed by Sony Ericsson, Samsung, and LG. ■ In Part 4 of this month’s report, we looked at the most popular sports sites visited by Opera Mini users around the world. ■ In Part 5 of this month's report, we held our very own Mobile Web World Cup. Chile scraped by Argentina to win the ﬁrst ever Opera Mini Mobile Web World Cup.

Number of users In June 2010, Opera Mini had over 59.4 m