If you need any more proof of how fast the mobile web is growing, just look at the latest numbers coming out of Opera today. The company is reporting a 157% increase in usage of their Opera Mini web browser from March 2008 to March 2009. And the mobile web isn’t just booming here in the Western world – it’s also experiencing rapid growth in places like Latin America and Nigeria, too.
Mobile Web Numbers
As of last month, more than 23 million mobile web surfers used Opera Mini to surf more than 8.6 billion pages in March, which equates to 148 million megabytes of data sent to handsets worldwide. Since Opera Mini compresses data before sending, that number actually represents 1.4 petabytes (PB) of uncompressed data. Data traffic is up 319%, year-over-year, and page views have increased by 255%.
Latin America Goes Mobile
This latest report from Opera focuses on Latin America. In that region, Chile went from ninth to first, overall, as Chilean mobile web use increased by 3200% over the past year. Brazil, Mexico, Venezuela, and Argentina followed to round out the top five.
In the region, Opera was able to determine which sites are being accessed the most by web surfers. According to their findings, Google, Live.com, and Facebook all do well in Latin America and Orkut remains the top social network in Brazil and Paraguay. Smaller social networking sites like hi5 are also popular in many countries.
Worldwide, Mobile Web Grows & Grows
Elsewhere in the world, the mobile web continues to grow rapidly. Opera found triple-digit pageview growth in most countries with double-digit user increases in all countries. Nigeria is the only exception as it experienced a more than 4000% pageview growth and 1500% user growth since March 2008.
The report delves into data from several different countries in order to provide statistics on pageview and user growth, top web sites, and top handsets for that region. Here, you can discover interesting tidbits like this: the top site in China is kong.net, a mobile portal that provides media, entertainment offerings, and community services. And, although Google makes the top 10 sites lists in many counties, in the Ukraine it’s nowhere to be found. You can also see how popular Nokia, Sony Ericsson, and Samsung handsets are in other parts of the world.
Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, reminds us that “a mobile phone will be the device most people use to access the web.” Looking back through these numbers, it’s easy to see how true that statement really is today.
