Like Millennial Media’s monthly S.M.A.R.T report, Opera’s monthly “State of the Mobile Web” report gives an inside snapshot of how the mobile Web is being consumed around the world and how users are interacting with mobile as seen from one of the most widely used mobile browsers in existence.
In November’s report, released today, usage has once again skyrocketed over the previous month and November of last year with Opera reporting a total of 41.7 million users — more than double the amount of users in November of 2008 — and a 5.3 percent increase over October 2009.
Opera users viewed 18.8 billion pages in November, a 231 percent increase over the previous year, and generated over 285 million MB of data for operators worldwide. It’s interesting to note that Opera compresses up to 90 percent of the data used by consumers, so without this compression, users would have viewed over 2.6 PB (petabytes) of data in November. Overall data traffic was up 213 percent over November 2008, showing just how much the mobile Web has matured over the past year.
This month’s report also highlighted mobile Web usage and reach in Africa, where usage has grown exponentially over the previous year. Ghana and Kenya, for example, lead the top 10 African countries in terms of page-view growth — 4,348.6% and 615.4%, respectively — while Ghana and Ivory Coast lead the top 10 African countries in growth of unique users-1,558.8% and 330.2%, respectively. Kenya also leads the top 10 African countries in page views, with each user browsing 525 pages on average each month.
These numbers are rather impressive, especially in terms of usage in developing countries, which again shows the continued growth and adoption of technology despite the harsh economic times. The report goes much more in depth in terms of usage broken down by geographical regions and more, you can view the full report here.
