Few are in a better position to know than Opera, maker of the web browser used on tens of millions of mobile phones.
The company says in its "State of the Mobile Web" quarterly report being released today that visits to social networks comprise almost 41 percent of all mobile web traffic. In the U.S., South Africa and Indonesia, more than 60 percent of the traffic goes to social networks. Nearly a quarter of all worldwide mobile traffic goes to search engines and content portals. The data is useful to anyone following the growth of social networks on cell phones. [We recently wrote about the ten most significant mobile social networks, and found MySpace and Facebook surprisingly robust.]
The report from the Oslo, Norway-based Opera shows that more than 11.9 million people used the Opera Mini browser in March to view 2.4 billion web pages. To date, 44 million users have tried Opera Mini. The 11.9 million users generate more than 32 million megabytes of data traffic.
Full web features -- where the browser accesses the same content as on the computer-based web -- accounts for 77 percent of the traffic while WAP-based content, which is recast for the mobile web, accounts for only 23 percent.
Those 11.9 million people generate more than 32 million MB of data traffic for operators worldwide. - One Web will triumph over WAP content: Full Web surfing comprises more than 77 percent of all traffic. WAP content still generates the remaining 23 percent of traffic. WAP percentages have declined somewhat as more consumers realize Opera Mini can access rich Web content.
In the U.S., where 63 percent of the traffic goes to social networks, the top ten sites are:
www.myspace.comwww.google.comwww.mocospace.comwww.yahoo.comwww.facebook.comwww.live.comwww.hi5.comwww.wikipedia.orgwww.itsmy.comwww.ebay.com
The Opera Mini browser, available for free, runs on more than 700 cell phones, including every phone with Java. The data is based on aggregate and anonymized stats from Opera Mini servers. The browser is most popular in the United States, Russia, China, Indonesia, India, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, South Africa and Ukraine.