690 crore rupees in data savings for Indian Opera Mini users

Findings from Opera’s State of the Mobile Web report

Users of the Opera Mini mobile browser saved 40,135,582 GB (36K Terabytes) of data in one year*, according to an analysis of the behavior of Opera Mini users in India. The saved data is worth INR 690 crore when calculated on the basis of 1 GB costing INR 173 on average. Opera Mini’s compression technology shrinks data by up to 90%, helping users save data.

Search is the primary reason to go online from a web browser

Eight out of 10 Opera Mini users in India frequent Google to search online. Although search websites experience a high amount of visitors, the number of search pages viewed account for only 10% of all pages. It is possible that these users then branch out to news and download websites, which make up 28% and 17% respectively of the top 100 most visited websites.

Social-networking accounts for the bulk of time spent online

Off all webpages viewed by Opera Mini users, 55% are social-networking sites. Facebook leads the pack – half of all webpages opened by users are from this site. Other popular social destinations include blogging sites, such as Blogspot and WordPress, followed by Twitter, Pinterest and Quora.

News is the second-most popular type of content viewed by users

Keeping up to date in this fast-moving world is a necessity. In all, 31 news websites make the list of top 100 websites for Opera Mini users in India. Consumers are reading up on various websites ranging from general news to sports to technology to politics. Opera also found that there is a consistent growth in visits to news sites in the Hindi language.

Opera Mini has a news feature on its start page that displays articles across categories such as News, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Travel and so on. Users can customize this feature  by choosing countries and categories. The news feed is available in English and Hindi.

“With their increased usage of smartphones, consumers have moved beyond using internet only for social networking. Consumers are now using their smartphones as handheld computers to browse news, shop online, watch movies and listen to music on the move,” says Bruce Lawson, Deputy CTO at Opera. “To stay ahead of our consumers’ ever-evolving needs, we keep updating Opera Mini to help them browse faster and more efficiently. The latest version of Opera Mini comes with new updates such as language support, a built-in ad blocker and video boost.”

Music sites are most visited among download portals

Of the top-100 sites visited by Opera Mini users in India 24 are download portals. 75% of these are for downloading music. Indians are truly grooving to their favorite tunes on their smartphones. Most visited websites include Mp3lio, Pagalworld, Webmusic, Raagtune and Mp3mad.

YouTube is an all-time favorite for viewing videos

The rise of affordable smartphones with large HD screens means today’s consumers are watching more videos on the go. With faster 3G availability and features like Opera Mini’s video boost feature, consumers also can watch video with fewer buffer delays. YouTube continues to be one of the top-3 most visited sites in India, along with Google and Facebook. In terms of video-streaming sites, YouTube is followed by Vuclip, Dailymotion and Hotstar.

Browsing products from smartphones gaining popularity

Consumers find it more convenient to check out products from their smartphones. E-commerce and classifieds mobile websites provide an equally enriching shopping experience compared to their desktop or app versions. Around 9% of the top 100 websites visited are e-commerce and classified websites. Some of the most visited sites are Amazon, Flipkart, Snapdeal, ShopClues, AskMeBazaar and Olx.

Opera’s State of the Mobile Web report

About the report and methodology

Information contained in this report is based on aggregated information obtained from Opera Mini servers from June 2015 – May 2016. The security and privacy of people who use Opera Mini is of paramount importance, and Opera safeguards users’ trust. Opera’s privacy policy is available here.

All content analysis is based on a review of the top sites, ranked according to the number of unique visitors in India. The designation of sites to specific categories has been done with local content experts who followed Opera’s guidelines to characterize each site.

Due to the explicit and potentially offensive nature of their content, adult-only sites have been excluded from our analysis.

Calculation of savings in data cost: From the 12 months of data between June 2015 – May 2016, we were able to determine the amount of data that was sent from the websites to Opera’s servers (uncompressed data) and the data that Opera sent to users’ phones (compressed data) after shrinking it. This gave us the total amount of data that Opera’s servers helped save users in 12 months: 40,135,582 GB. Then, to be fair, we used an average of 2G in data costs (1 GB @Rs 173) to calculate the minimum amount that users ended up saving to arrive with the figure of Rs 690 crore worth data saved.