Nordic countries have a craving for online news

What is it with the Nordic countries and their obsession with news on the web? In the latest State of the Mobile Web report, Opera Software takes a look at the surfing habits of Opera Mini mobile browser users in the Nordic countries of Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Finland.

By looking at only the domains strongly connected to the different countries, i.e., ending in “.se” for Sweden and “.dk” for Denmark, the list provides a good indication for which local sites are the most read on mobile phones in each country.

Some interesting facts found about the Nordic users surfing habits:

• Counting only local domains, each country has a news site as its number-one read website. For this report, “news sites” means newspapers and broadcasters.
• Do they read anything else than news from local sites? In three quarters of the countries, news sites were 70% of the top-ten lists. Other sites, such as phonebook services, weather information and entertainment news, rounded out the top-ten lists.
• The Nordic countries have a particularly high smartphone penetration among Opera Mini users, with Norway being on top, with more than 80% of the users on smartphones.

The lists were created using anonymous and aggregated data from users of Opera Mini, a mobile web browser that compresses data to as little as 10 % of its original size by sending it through Opera’s compression servers.

Growth of Opera Mini

The Opera Mini and Opera mobile web browsers for smartphones mobile web browsers enjoyed  good growth in the month of January 2014. Combined, more than 275 million users worldwide used Opera mobile browsers, with 254 million of these using the Opera Mini to access the web.

The Opera Mini users alone viewed a whopping 189 billion webpages in January, creating more than 4.3 billion MB of data for operators worldwide.

To read more about the surfing habits of the Nordic countries, as well as in-depth data on Opera Mini usage, please visit the State of the Mobile Web report.