It’s that time of the year again in which we take a look back at what’s been happening over the past 12 months in terms of mobile web. Thanks to the folks at Opera, we have a clear picture of the Internet from the perspective of the wider community through its State of the Mobile Web report for 2011.
Over the past year, search and social networking remain the top sites accessed from around the world with Nokia again dominating the list of mobile phones using Opera mini. Latin America took over as the fastest growing region as globally, the number of web pages served doubled over the past year
Having a top mobile browser on the planet in terms of reach, adoption and growth, Opera is well positioned to discover and present the prevailing trends and behaviors of Internet users across the globe.
Mobile is where the Internet lives. Growth and adoption of the Internet among mobile users is higher than ever before and this is reflected by the ever increasing rise in websites being accessed from mobile devices. Consequently, behaviors of mobile users are also reflected by the sites that received the most visits.
Top ranked sites
In terms of most visited sites from November 2010 to November 2011, there’s been a few changes in the rankings. Most of the top 10 remains the same but the order has shifted a little bit with a couple of sites replaced.
The top ten sites of 2011 as compared to 2010 are as follows (position relative to last year in parentheses):
- google.com
- facebook.com
- youtube.com (+1)
- vkontakte.ru (-1)
- odnoklassniki.ru
- yandex.ru
- wikipedia.org (+4)
- my.opera.com
- yahoo.com (-2)
- twitter.com (+2)
Search and social networking are still popular among Opera mini users with Google and Facebook topping the chart yet again and Russian search site Yandex and social networks Vkontakte and Odnoklassniki remain on the list. Twitter finally breaks through the top 10.
From the Indonesian perspective, it might be worthwhile to note that while Detik.com made it to the top 20 sites of 2010, its popularity has dropped relative to other sites as it is no longer on the list for 2011. It used to occupy 17th position ahead of spaces.ru, blogspot.com, and live.com.
Wikipedia, Blogspot, and Spaces have shot up on the list while Detik and Microsoft’s Live have disappeared. Two other sites that lost their places are Wapdam and Orkut. The incoming replacements are Mobile99, Vuclip, Dictionary, and Waptrick.
Top ranked devices
When it comes to handsets, Nokia is still dominant. Year after year, despite the fall from grace in terms of media popularity, mind share, and profitability, Nokia still manages to place 18 out of 20 top phones around the world using Opera mini, six of them new entries to the list.
While Apple’s iPhone placed fifth last year, this year it has dropped off completely from the top 20. This very likely signifies a shift back to Safari as the preferred browser among iPhone users following a curiosity-led adoption of Opera mini after its long awaited launch on the iPhone in April last year.
Not a single Android phone registered on the list. While it may sound a little surprising, it is actually expected since Opera mini is far more popular among regular phones than smartphones thanks to its speed, versatility and data compression, not to mention familiarity compared to competing browsers in the space.
Growth
As the number of Internet users grow, so did Opera mini. The mobile browser saw 144.6 million users in November of this year, served 88.5 billion pages and compressed 13.2 petabytes of data.
Led by Mexico, Latin America saw the largest growth in the past year with 247% rise in the number of users compared to last year’s growth leader Southeast Asia which grew at 138% but was also beaten by Africa at 145%. Indonesia, which has always been seen as a top five country in terms of Opera mini adoption saw very little growth compared to other top Opera mini nations.
Given the compression rate of up to 90%, Opera mini users were actually served “only” 1.4 terabytes of data last month instead of 13.2 petabytes, saving massive bandwidth costs for both operators and mobile users alike.
There had been nearly 110% more data consumed compared to November 2010 when it reached 677.7 gigabytes. In terms of pages, November 2011 saw 88.5 billion pages served compared to 44.6 billion a year ago.
Opera’s data on the report go back only until December 2009 and if all the pages served were added up, the browser has served 1,164 billion pages. By the way, McDonald’s supposedly served its 247 billionth burger in April last year with over a billion burgers a month served.