The folks at Opera have started publishing aggregate numbers for the user behavior they see through their proxy browser, Opera Mini. Interesting to see that their overall growth numbers and pageviews metrics are keeping their symmetric relationship with the numbers from AdMob. When you have just one independent source publishing numbers it’s easy to dismiss them as providing skewed data. When two sources operating very different products publish numbers that indicate the same overall trends it’s much more difficult to dismiss.
The part of the report that has me most interested is the list of top sites per region. In particular the list for the United States:
- www.myspace.com
- www.google.com
- www.mocospace.com
- www.yahoo.com
- www.facebook.com
- www.live.com
- www.hi5.com
- www.wikipedia.org
- www.itsmy.com
- www.ebay.com
Most of them not too much of a problem explaining. Social networking is huge, people create their profile, check back as often as they can to see if they have messages. No problem. Makes sense that widget providers ride on that traffic. Google is the default search on the Opera start page, Yahoo continues to have a great consumer brand presence.
How about Mocospace and Itsmy however? Really mobile-specific social networks. Assume that the users of Opera Mini are regular consumers, Yahoo and Facebook should be well ahead of Mocospace. Assume that they’re early adopter mobile geeks and it makes sense to have Mocospace and mobile specific services.
And what’s the deal with Wikipedia in there? Do folks actually use the search options from the start page and do Wikipedia specific searches? Is the “trivia night at the local pub” use-case popular enough that it makes Wikipedia #8 top site even when looking at such a large sample? Or are “mobile searches” no matter what the purpose tending toward Wikipedia entries in organic search results just because of the way mobile searches structure their queries?
Great to see data corroborating other stats. Can’t wait till the next month of stats comes out. My gut feeling here is that Opera Mini “went mainstream” during the final quarter of last year. Assuming the steady growth in users but jagged increase in pageviews was due to a shift going on in the userbase being catered to. So what we see in the top 10 is actually a blend of the existing early adopter user behavior and the new creamy middle consumer.
In the next few months those normal users should vastly outnumber the early users and we should see the brands from online filling up those top 10 lists and the niche behavior sites like Wikipedia falling out. There’s always going to be skew toward those who deliver info usable by folks on the go I would assume. The Yahoo portal has always hit those targets well, timely info about rapidly changing data of interest to large groups of readers. Will EBay remain in there? Does rapidly changing data trump relatively niche usage?
Hello Mike, I follow you on twitter to get mobile trend news.
I am curious about numbers for other search engines such as the human powered ones like Mahalo.com any numbers on those sites yet?
Hi Mike,
As a user of wikipedia I can see why it is up there, however I’m stunned at ebay, wouldn’t have thought their site was ‘user functional’ enough for mobile usage.
Whilst Opera users are a little skewed I think it’s a great datapoint. If they increase the list of sites expect to see the top 20 dominated by ‘additional’ social networking sites.
As per the article listed here http://mobileanalytics.com/forum/index.php?topic=42.0 there are something like 47 new mobile social networks with massive numbers in the last few years alone.
It’s the ideal medium / content for ‘quick easy bite size snacks of social interaction’.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Amethon.com
I for one do wikipedia-specific searches (added the word to my T9 dictionary even). Especially on mobile its easier to get to an actual data repository than sifting through all the general results.
However: The google search thinger on my home screen means that I end up using the default (Nokia) browser a lot anymore. When I know I am browsing, I launch Opera. When its a search, I get the other. Sad and annoying, but speed is king in this space.
I am actually on wikipedia a LOT on my mobile phone. it’s so useful to look up something while someone is talking about it, or look up information for a friend. their site already looks great when my pocket IE (Windows-Mobile based HTC Wizard user here) opens them. google.com/m is my home page. I am on facebook mobile and myspace mobile all the time, to check for new messages like you mention. I am not on yahoo ever, and there isn’t much activity in my area on mocospace or itsmy but I have used them. Since this IS a WM phone, live.com is pretty fun to play around on, and if I ever get into such things it might be my #1 mobile choice for publishing pics and blogs on-the-go (even though facebook makes things super easy, as well as blogger.com).
I’m just as surprised as the other comments about ebay being anywhere close to the top of a mobile list. I’d be interested in more specifics on that… did they just go to ebay to see if it actually looked any good on a mobile or proxy-based mobile browser? or did they actually make a purchase.
cool information, thanks :) now i’m going to have to see what hi5 mobile is all about…whatever happened to dodgeball!
I can answer what happened to Dodgeball :)
http://valleywag.com/tag/dennis-crowley/
Basically Dennis and Alex sold it to Google, they hated it, left and have moved on to other things.
I’ve never met Alex but every time I talk to Dennis he is either about to head off on a ski trip or just come back from one so dont feel too bad for him.
Cheers,
Dean Collins
http://www.Amethon.com