Opera: State of the Mobile Web, Year-End 2010

Opera Software has released its State of the Mobile Web report for November 2010 today, but has also taken the opportunity to look back at the preceding months to summarize trends and statistics related to global mobile Web usage for 2010. The findings? Mobile Web surfing is way, way up.

Opera served 340 billion pages during the first 11 months of the year compared with only 129 billion pages during the same period in 2009. There are now 80 million users on the mobile Web using Opera’s Mini browser – a 91.8% increase from last year. And Facebook and Google are still top Web destinations, but the two have swapped the number 1 and 2 slots as 2010 draws to a close.

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Opera releases its “State of the Mobile Web” reports after each month ends, so this will be the last report released in this calendar year. That means this year-end report is shy one month: December. However, there’s still a lot of data that can be analyzed from the first 11 months of the year.

Growth from Nov. 2009 to Nov. 2010

According to Opera, 80 million of its users surfed over 44.6 billion pages in November. Page views have gone up 137.3% since November 2009.

Users of Opera’s Mini browser generated over 677 million MB of data for mobile operators worldwide in November, a 137.6% increase in data traffic since November 2009.

In both developing markets and established ones, mobile Web usage has grown substantially since last year. To give you an idea, since last November, page views are up 60.5% in Indonesia, up 123.8% in Russia, up 416.9% in India, up 82.3% in China, up 135.3% in the Ukraine, up 302.2% in Belarus, up 114.1% in South Africa, up 369.4% in Vietnam, up 404.1% in Nigeria, up 1,535.9% in Brazil, up 99.5% in the U.K. and up 103.1% in the U.S. (Several more countries statistics are listed in part two of the report here, including a detailed spotlight on Latin American countries).

2010 Trends

Opera ended this month’s report by taking a look back at year-end trends. It looked at top sites, top handsets, growth rates and data increases.

Globally, Facebook and Google remain the top two websites people access from their mobile phones, but last year Facebook was number one and Google was number two. This year, those spots are reversed with Google coming in on top.

Social networking sites like Twitter, Orkut and Live.com and video viewing site YouTube.com also saw increases since November of last year. And in case there’s any doubt about Nokia’s place on the worldwide stage (at least in terms of Opera users), its handsets took 25 out of the 30 spots on the top handset makers chart for the year. Only Samsung, LG, Sony Ericsson and Apple had a showing here. And since Opera now has an iPhone application, the iPhone registered on the chart in the fifth slot.

In determining regional growth, Opera looked at combined user, page-view and data-transfer statistics for top countries in various regions. Latin America saw the most growth in 2010, followed by South Asia.