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Opera Says Girls Don't Care About Mobile Browsing

Recently unveiled report shows men are making more use of Opera Mini

Jun 20, 2008 17:34 GMT  ·  By
Opera Mini in a girl's hand
   Opera Mini in a girl's hand

A recent report published by Opera, the company behind the well-known browser which "puts the Web on any device", unveiled that women and girls make use of mobile browsing far less than men do.

Opera made a survey in order to find out more about who and how is using mobile Internet browsing. The Norwegian company made its report based on the users of Opera Mini - the most popular mobile browser in the wold, compatible with over 800 cell phones.

Opera has found that 88.1% of the users browsing the Web via Opera Mini are males, while only 11.9% are females.

In the US, the female percentage of users who browse the Web from mobile phones is of 19.4%, leaving 80.6% for the men. As expected, Google is the No.1 website when it comes to mobile visits. The G portal is followed by MySpace, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Facebook, NY Times's website and YouTube. Google is also the most popular mobile website in countries like India and Germany, but it's outrun by Yahoo in the UK or by Facebook in South Africa.

Lately, users browse the Web from their mobiles also for football reasons. With the Euro 2008 Championships close to its hottest stage, websites that publish football-related info are among the ones which account for a lot of mobile traffic.

"In the previous report, we looked at what people did on the mobile Web. With this next report we look at who uses the mobile Web. Because accessing the Web on mobile devices will become more pervasive than accessing the Web with computers, we expect that over time one gender or one age range will not dominate. We will see how these numbers change in time as more people discover the absolute convenience of browsing the Web on their mobile phones," said Jon von Tetzchner, Opera Software's famous CEO.

Other interesting aspects unveiled by Opera are the facts that Opera Mini is mainly used by people between 18 and 27 years old. Moreover, the total amount of traffic "passed" through Opera Mini browsers in May is of more than 43.2 million MB, achieved after the browsing of about 2.9 billion Websites.