VanguardNgr.com Ranks 8th On Opera’s Mobile Web Report

There are two things that you can’t take away from Nigerians: Facebook and News.

If you give a Nigerian a mobile phone with internet access, he’ll most likely visit Facebook or search for news on Google.

And just make your news site mobile-friendly, and they’ll show you love.

That’s exactly what we can see from the latest Opera State of the Mobile Web report, January 2011.

Vanguard, one of Nigeria’s leading newspapers recently made its website – which runs on the WordPress platform, mobile-friendly barely two months ago.

The result?

The site now ranks number 8th most visited site in Nigeria in the Opera Mini report.

Here’s the full list of the top 10 most visited sites in Nigeria (January 2011) by unique users:

1. facebook.com
2. google.com
3. yahoo.com
4. bbc.co.uk
5. goal.com
6. wikipedia.org
7. my.opera.com
8. vanguardngr.com
9. youtube.com
10. cnnmobile.com

Over the last few months, Vanguard improved on their content production and distribution and seemed to have re-evaluated their content strategy.

Also noteworthy is how they’ve embraced and engaged with their audience via social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, paying keen and close attention to the conversations on the social web.

Last July, I wrote about Vanguard launching their news content on an exisiting mobile app powered by Newshunt.

The mobile app enables you to read Vanguard Newspaper right from your mobile phone 24/7 on the go and is completely free.

All of these put together and other factors have made Vanguard become one of the most innovative newspaper organizations in Nigeria.

Vanguard now ranks alongside news content sites like BBC, Goal.com and CNN Mobile.

Surprisingly, Nairaland which is a rich-content site longer ranks on the top 10 list, as it used to.

Will Vanguard move up in the rankings? Will other Nigerian news sites copy Vanguard’s mobile web strategy?

While Vanguard has demonstrated innovation in making news readily and easily accessible, I’m waiting to see their apps on Blackberry, iPad and Android devices.