While living patterns that don’t differ greatly from day to day for many Americans — especially during the work week — how they use their mobile devices does vary depending on the day of week. On Wednesdays, for instance, more Americans visit sports sites on their phones than any other day of the week, even compared to Saturday and Sunday.
This edition of the State of the Mobile Web report by web company Opera Software examines these types of weekly usage patterns, using information about the type of sites visited by Opera Mini users in the United States. In addition to variations by day of week, the report also looks at traffic to different website categories throughout a 24-hour period, reflecting Americans’ mobile content consumption over the course of a day.
Key trends noted in the report:
- Shopping and real estate sites are most popular midweek, while fashion, games, religion & spirituality, hobbies, and arts & entertainment sites are busiest on the weekends.
- In some cases, traffic (measured by number of unique visitors) and engagement (measured by number of page views) are not always in sync. Mobile sites in the Food & Drink, Family & Parenting, Business, and Health & Fitness categories see high levels of traffic on one day but hit their engagement peak on another.
- Americans are spending their mornings (6-10 a.m.) in “lean forward” activities like Shopping, Social Networking and Research in categories like Automotive and Travel. Their afternoons (2-6 p.m.) are spent more in “lean back” activities like checking Business and News sites and browsing Fashion, Education, and Arts & Entertainment content.
- Many Americans are using the late night and early morning hours (10 p.m. – 2 a.m.) to plan their futures: visits to career and personal finance sites peak during this period.
To see the detailed graphics on U.S. mobile traffic by day of week and time of day, go to business.opera.com/smw.
Growth
In August 2013, the consumer base of the Opera Mini, Opera for Android and Mobile Classic browsers had more than 264 million unique users globally – showing a 26% increase in users year over year. In all, 36% of them are browsing the web with smartphones.
Opera Mini users viewed more than 176 billion pages and generated over 3.7 billion MB of data worldwide. Data in the Opera Mini browser is compressed to as little as 10% of its original size. If this data were uncompressed, Opera Mini users would have viewed over 15 petabytes of data.