Opera Mini: State of the Mobile Web February 2010: Users up, page views and data down

Opera Mini, a piece of software that runs on most feature phones and smart phones that intercepts your request for a webpage, sends it to a remote server that compresses said webpage by up to 90%, and then spits it back to your device, is becoming more and more popular each month. In the latest “State of the Mobile Web” that Opera published, users are reportedly up 1.7% compared to last month, now reaching over 50.5 million, pages transcoded and data consumed are both down however due to the the fact that February is shorter than all the other months.

For users from the USA, compared to February 2009, there were 154.9% more pages transcoded, and 103.4% more users. Each user during February 2010 viewed an average of 278 web pages and consumed 6 MB. The top three sites, in order, are Google, Facebook and Yahoo. The most popular device was the BlackBerry 8330 (also known as the Curve), and RIM is enjoying 5 spots in the list of the 10 most active devices using the service, which says a lot about RIM’s built in browser.

Opera is also trying to push some numbers based on fuzzy maths, saying that on average people pay $1 for 1 MB of data, and using that figure Opera Mini users are earning operators $1.2 billion per year. The Opera Mini users generating the most operator revenues are the Americans with $146.40/user/year, and the United Kingdom with $102/user/year. The cheapest folks are Indians at $8.76/user/year and South Africans at $11.52/user/year. These numbers are based on assumptions so of course take them with a grain, or in this case a mountain, of salt.

One more thing … it’s been almost 6 days since Opera has submitted Opera Mini for Apple’s App Store approval. Think they’ll get in?

Update: Got a nice email from Thomas Ford, Global Communications Manager at Opera clarifying how that $1.2 billion per year figure was calculated:

I just wanted to clarify a little about our math in today’s State of the Mobile Web Report. The $1/MB global average was only used to derive one figure, and that was the $4 billion worldwide number. We used this because we could not find a reputable global average.

The $1.25 billion number has actual research supporting it. That number covers only operators in the top 10 countries. In those countries, we looked at metered rates offered by the top operators for 1 MB of mobile data. We then averaged those rates to create an average price per MB for each country. This average was multiplied by the data transferred in each country. We used February’s data transfer numbers and multiplied by 12.

This is just one way of accounting for the value Opera Mini gives operators. Of course, it does not account for flat-rate plans (because we do not know what plan a particular Opera Mini user has) and also does not account for the historical growth rate of data transfers in each country. We may add the latter calculation to future reports.

Thanks for clearing that up Thomas!