Opera has released a report on the state of the mobile web. And considering the company claims more than 44 million users for its Opera Mini cellphone web browser, Opera's in as good a position as any company to report on mobile web usage.
There are two trends that are particularly noteworthy. First, 77% of all traffic was to full web pages, not stripped down mobile pages. This probably shouldn't be that surprising, since Opera Mini renders full pages pretty quickly and lets users zoom in and out to read the fine print. And while WAP might have been pretty exciting a few years ago when there wasn't as much rich media content on the web, and when mobile internet connections were significantly slower, those days are long gone.
The second trend is a bit more surprising. 40% of worldwide traffic was directed to social networks. In some countries including the US, South Africa, and Indonesia, that number was as high as 60%. Now, it's not like we didn't know that social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, and Bebo were popular. We just didn't figure people would be spending half of their mobile web browsing time visiting them.
What sites do you visit regularly with your mobile web browser?
[via VentureBeat]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-20-2008 @ 11:41AM
Rex said...
Hmmm, dilbert, engadget and slashdot, plus the occasional wikipedia
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5-20-2008 @ 11:46AM
Christian said...
Makes sense. I know I prefer to catch up on what my friends are doing in my spare time, and mobile web access is a spare time kind of service. If there's any real business to do, I break out my laptop or sit down at a desktop, but if I'm waiting for a meeting I'll just read Facebook updates and RSS feeds.
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5-24-2008 @ 11:42PM
leftystrat said...
How exactly do they KNOW this?
The article states they `examined aggregate data'.
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