Male/Female Ratio 9/1 on Mobile Web, Says Opera

Men outnumber women on the mobile web almost nine to one according to Opera's latest State of the Mobile Web report, published today. This edition provides demographic insight into the people browsing the web on their mobile phones.
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Select highlights from the May report:

  • Men use the mobile web most: 88.1 percent of people using the mobile web are male.
  • Most people using Opera Mini are between the ages of 18-27.
  • More than 14.7 million people used Opera Mini in May to browse 2.9 billion pages. The number of active users has risen more than 23 percent since March.
  • Opera Mini served more than 43.2 million MB of data traffic in May, up 30.4% since March.
  • As Opera Mini serves compressed data to handsets around the world, the actual amount of data requested by people using Opera Mini is more than 288 million MB.

Top 10 sites in the U.S. (# of unique users)
United States

  1. google.com
  2. myspace.com
  3. yahoo.com
  4. wikipedia.org
  5. facebook.com
  6. nytimes.com
  7. youtube.com
  8. espn.com
  9. cnn.com 
  10. accuweather.com

User demographics in US: Male 80.6% Female 19.4%

Age : Less than 18 8.3% / 18-27 43.7% / 28-37 29.6% / 38-47 11.4% / 48+ 7.0%

“In the previous report, we looked at what people did on the mobile web. With this next report we look at who uses the mobile web,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Chief Executive Officer, Opera Software. “Because accessing the web on mobile devices will become more pervasive than accessing the web with computers, we expect that over time one gender or one age range will not dominate. We will see how these numbers change in time as more people discover the absolute convenience of browsing the web on their mobile phones.”

Special Spotlight: Sports

With the UEFA Euro 2008 football tournament happening this month and the Olympics following next month, the report also includes a spotlight on the most popular sports sites on the mobile web.

As the world’s most popular web browser for mobile phones, Opera Mini provides an elegant, fast and rich web browsing experience. While some web browsers work on only 20 to 30 phone models, Opera Mini runs on more than 800 different handsets, making it the available to the widest range of consumers worldwide. Almost every phone with Java can run Opera Mini. Completely free for anyone to download and use, Opera Mini is available from http://www.operamini.com.

Data in the report is based on aggregate and anonymous statistics from Opera Mini servers. All percentages are based on a snapshot of the Top 100 sites for each region. Demographic data was collected from voluntary user surveys that were made available to a random subset of Opera Mini users, via their handsets, in English, Russian, Chinese, German and Polish. Surveys responses were collected between February 2008 and June 2008.

Beyond providing a snapshot of worldwide browsing trends, Opera’s “State of the Mobile Web” highlights the browsing trends in the ten countries where Opera Mini is most popular: the United States, Russia, China, Indonesia, India, United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, South Africa and Ukraine.
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