14 DAY TRIAL // Norwegian software company Opera announced on Monday that its Opera Mini web browser had seen a major growth in usage, page views and data transfers. In March 2009, more than 23 million people used Opera Mini, marking a 157 percent increase compared to the same time frame a year ago, and a 12.1 percent increase from the previous month.
At the same time, the company also announced that more than 8.6 billion pages were viewed using Opera Mini in March, and that, compared to February, these went up by 17.4 percent. On a yearly basis, the page views on the browser registered a whopping increase of 255 percent, says a State of the Mobile Web report, which can be found here.
Data transfers using Opera Mini went up as well, with a total of 148 million MB of data being served to mobile phones all around the world. Compared to February, data transfers also registered growth, being 19.3 percent higher. According to Opera, the browser compresses data with 90 percent on average, translated into an uncompressed amount of nearly 1.4 PB. Compared to the same time frame last year, data traffic went up 319 percent.
“A mobile phone will be the device most people use to access the Web,” said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. “As millions of people each month discover the Web through Opera Mini, content providers have an incredible opportunity to seize competitive advantage in this new medium. By simply ensuring their content works on any device, they will open themselves to the next generation of Web users.”
The company's report is mainly focused on Latin America, which shows a great boom for the time frame. Thus, page views in March 2009 went up 673 percent compared to March 2008, overall unique users rose 164, while data transfers went up 510 in top 10 countries in the area. In addition, Opera also says that Google, Live and Facebook did well in the area, though the leading social networking site in Brazil and Paraguay was Orkut. A great interest was seen in smaller social-networking sites, like hi5.