State of the mobile web in South Africa

Opera Software, the company behind Opera mini – a web browser you can install on your phone, has released their August, state of the Mobile Web report.

One thing I love about all these mobile reports is how much South Africa is highlighted in them. We are constantly in the top 5 countries in the world with Mobile penetration and Stafford Massie from Google SA will tell you over and over again how South Africa sends Google’s mobile search the most traffic in the world!

Some highlights from the report

• South Africa is listed 6th in the world in terms of mobile usage above United States and China!
• In South Africa, the top 100 sites (in terms of page views) generated 38% of that country’s total page views via Opera Mini.
• Opera Mini was used to view over 4.1 billion pages in August. Out of the over 12 million sites viewed, 87 sites generated more than half of those 4.1 billion page views, with the vast number of other visited sites generating the rest.
• Therefore, it appears that mobile Web users spend a significant amount of time browsing the Long Tail of the Web in addition to the most popular online destinations.

Top 10 sites in South Africa

1. facebook.com
2. google.com
3. wikipedia.org (back on the list)
4. gamejump.com (down from 3)
5. yahoo.com (down from 4)
6. mxit.co.za
7. peperonity.com (up from 8 )
8. capetown.gumtree.co.za (up from 10)
9. amazon.com (new)
10. twilightwap.com (new)

The report makes for some very interesting reading, so go take a look at the full report here.