Opera just released its latest State of the Mobile Web report. In this report, Opera focused on analyzing the behavior of users of Opera Mini, the company’s mobile Web browser. Worldwide, Facebook is the leading social network among Opera Mini users, and the social network saw its traffic from Opera Mini users increase by 619%. Twitter’s global growth rate was close to 2,900%. In the US, however, Opera Mini’s users are not very interested in using Twitter. Traffic to Twitter from Opera Mini users declined 21% over the course of the last year.
Update: Opera just informed us that there was a large error in the report. Twitter’s numbers didn’t drop 21% last year. Instead, Twitter’s numbers actually increased by 689%. You can find the rest of the original post – including the conclusions we drew based on the faulty data – below.
Opera collects its data from users of its Opera Mini browser. As every request is routed through Opera’s servers, which then compress the sites to speed up delivery, Opera is able to collect very accurate statistics about its user base. In total, over 46.3 million people use Opera Mini every month and these users access close to 20 billion pages.
It’s important to note that some of this data is skewed towards the countries and regions where Opera is highly popular. These include Russia, Southeast Asia and Great Britain. This explains the large number of Russian social networks like vKontakte and spaces.ru in Opera’s global top 10. If anything, however, this strong bias towards Russian sites makes Facebook’s growth rate even more impressive.
Opera Mini in the US
In the US, the most popular site among Opera users is Google, followed by Facebook and Yahoo. Also in the top 10 are Wikipedia, MySpace, Opera’s own homepage, YouTube, CNN, ESPN and AccuWeather.
Twitter.com’s Growth Rate in the US in 2009: -21%
With regards to social networks in the US, Opera registered a 194% year-over-year growth for Facebook.
MySpace, which hasn’t gotten a lot of good press lately, managed to grow 25% in the US, while the number of users who went to Twitter.com on their Opera-enabled mobile phones declined by 21%. Globally, however, Twitter grew 2,859%.
Considering that some of these users probably opted to use a dedicated Twitter client instead of a mobile browser, these numbers by themselves aren’t too alarming for Twitter. It could also be that very few of the most active Twitter users are also Opera Mini users. In the context of some of the other numbers about Twitter we have covered in the last few weeks, though, this decline lends more credence to the theory that Twitter isn’t attracting a lot of new users in the US anymore.
