State of the Mobile Web: Long Tail Sites Increase Their Presence

Ed: Impressive growth for Opera, but not significant when compared to the global view. 

• Mobile phones swamp the number of PC users; yet, the 4 billion views is 0.4% of the total views, possibly less.
• 242 pages per month compares to over 1,000 average per month per user, possibly 2,500 in the USA. 
• In international counties, the mobile phone may be the only Internet access. Thus, these numbers are even less impressive. Still, mobile use is emerging and promising. iPhone and Google Android are likely to make these numbers a substantial portion of the total.

State of the Mobile Web: Long Tail Sites Increase Their Presence

from ReadWriteWeb by Richard MacManus

Browser vendor Opera, which is a stronger player in the mobile browser market than it is on the desktop, has just released more data on of the state of the Mobile Web. The latest report tells us that usage of the mobile Web continues to grow in terms of unique users and page views. What's more, 'long tail' sites are showing up well in the data too, which is a sure sign the Mobile Web is gaining traction in key growth markets like the U.S. and China.

The company states that in August, their mobile browser Opera Mini (our coverage) was used by approximately 17.3 million users, who viewed more than 4.1 billion pages - about 242 pages per user, per month.

Part 1: Growth

Number of Users

In August, Opera Mini was used by approximately 17.3 million users, a 9.1% month-on-month increase from July and more than 357% compared to August 2007.

Pages transcoded by Opera Mini per month

Pages Transcoded

Opera Mini users viewed more than 4.1 billion pages in August. Each person using Opera Mini viewed approximately 242 pages on average. For the third month in a row, the number of pages viewed per user has gone up. Since July, page views have gone up 11.7%. Since August 2007, this number is up 337%.

Total data consumed per month (in MB)

Data Consumed

In August, 17.3 million Opera Mini users generated more than 60.3 million MB of data for operators worldwide. Since July, the data consumed went up by 12.1%. Data in Opera Mini is compressed 90% on average. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 603 million MB of data in August.

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