For the first time since Opera Mini launched, users viewed more than 10 billion sites in one month
By Stefan Constantinescu on Monday, July 27th, 2009 at 2:22 AM PST In Applications
Opera Mini, for the three people who have never heard of it, is a J2ME application that uses server side compression technology to deliver websites at a fraction of the size they would be if you viewed them in your mobile phone’s regular browser. I let the browser on my Nokia (NYSE: NOK) E71 handle mobile optimized websites, but when browsing the full internet, also known as desktop sites, I always use Opera Mini. It is one of my favorite mobile applications and if you’re not using it then you’re just wasting your time looking at that scroll bar, waiting for a page to load. Every month Opera releases a report called “State of the Mobile Web” that offers some insights and statistics as to what sites certain countries are visiting, how much data is being processed, and the number of users. Today they’ve announced that a new milestone has been reached: 10 billion sites processed in one month. Other data from this month’s report:
- Opera Mini had 26.5 million users. An increase of 4.2% from the previous month, and an increase of 143% compared to June 2008
- 10.4 billion websites were processed, an increase of 8.4% compared to May, and an increase of 224% compared to June 2008
- 164,453 gigabytes of data were sent to mobile phones via Opera Mini’s servers, an increase of 5.6% compared to May, and an increase of 236% compared to June 2008
- Top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage, in order: Russia, Indonesia, India, China, Ukraine, South Africa, U.S., U.K., Poland, Nigeria.
- Top 10 websites that people in North America view:
- google (NSDQ: GOOG).com
- facebook.com
- myspace.com
- wikipedia.org
- cnn.com
- youtube.com
- yahoo.com
- my.opera.com
- nytimes.com
- accuweather.com
Hmmm…I suspect these stats are pretty meaningless. All of those Top 10 are likely candidates for someone to have as their Opera mobile “home page”. So since on many platforms (like BlackBerry for example) you can’t set Opera to be your “default browser”, whatever your home page is set to gets a hit count every time you fire up Opera to get check out some site.
What’s also funny is that every one of those Top 10 has a mobile optimized site already. What benefit does Opera provide in seeing the “regular” site versus the already mobile optimized native site???