Explore Posterous

Welcome to another edition of our State of the Mobile Web report. I think this might be our most fascinating report yet.

This past month we introduced the first beta of Opera Mini 5, a browser that we are very proud to share with you. One aspect of Opera Mini we often publicize is the compression technology, because it gives both speed and cost savings. This month we actually quantify how much we save consumers: up to 8.1 billion dollars per year off their mobile-phone bills. And that is just within the top 10 countries for Opera Mini usage.

Eight billion dollars also underscores just how much people actually browse from their phone. This month, we passed two major milestones: more than 500 million page-views per day, on average, and more than 2 petabytes of data processed by our servers every month.

We are on a mission to bring the Web to everyone, on their terms. By making the mobile Web more affordable, we help democratize it. More people can use more of the Web. And, with more than half the world’s population using a mobile phone, we can expand the reach of the Web in a way that almost defies imagination. I hope you join us for the ride, for what a ride it will be.

Thanks for reading,
Jon S. von Tetzchner

Highlights

• In addition to the usual increases in all three categories of growth (users, pages viewed and data consumed), Opera Mini achieved a major milestone in September 2009: passing the 2PB barrier of uncompressed data processed by Opera Mini in a month (based on a compression rate of up to 90%).
• In September 2009, Nigeria fell off of the top 10 countries list, while Vietnam made its debut (as we predicted last month).
• In this month’s report, we added two new categories of data for each of the highlighted countries: data transferred per user and data transferred per page-view.
• In this month’s report, we looked at countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). The top 11 countries using Opera Mini in the CIS are: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Uzbekistan, Moldova, Kyrgyzstan, Azerbaijan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.
• Some numbers regarding the CIS: From September 2008 to September 2009, overall page views in the top 11 countries listed increased 133%. From September 2008 to September 2009, overall unique users in the top 11 countries listed increased 55%. From September 2008 to September 2009, overall data transferred in the top 11 countries listed increased 174%.
• Growth rates in the CIS: Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan lead the top 11 countries in growth of unique users.
• Nokia and Sony Ericsson are by far the most popular handset brands chosen by Opera Mini users in the CIS.
• Users in the top 10 countries save up to 672 million USD per month, or over 8.1 billion USD per year.
• On a monthly basis, users in the United States and the United Kingdom save the most money using Opera Mini, based on their usage and the average cost of browsing (per MB).