In its latest State of the Mobile Web for February, Opera made a few bold statements regarding the breadth of its Opera Mini mobile Web browser, and the effect it has on not only mobile users, but mobile carriers as well.
Because of Opera’s compression technology, which crunches mobile data by up to 90%, the company takes great pride in helping curb data charges for mobile consumers- estimating it saves users $8 billion per year on average.
Because of this, users of Opera Mini browse the mobile Web a lot more than usual, according to Opera themselves, creating increased mobile data revenues for carriers along the way. In its latest report, the company claims Opera Mini generates more than $1 billion per year for operators globally.
While these numbers may or may not be true, Opera’s compression technology has helped its mobile browser see incredible usage since its inception, creating a “win-win” solution for consumers and operators alike. Of course, publishing numbers like these in hopes of wooing carriers stressed by increased mobile data strain is a likely motive. Still, their methodology is a prime example of what needs to be done on the mobile Web- giving it the smallest footprint possible to curb as much data transfer as possible.
Other stats published in the report are the usual ones- namely that the mobile Web continues to grow by leaps and bounds. Opera Mini saw increases in all three categories of growth in February 2010: unique users, pages viewed and data consumed. In all, 50.5 million people used Opera Mini in February, over 22 billion pages were served, and 3 petabytes of operator data were compressed for users of Opera Mini.
