Nigeria Beats Ukraine, Becomes World’s 4th Largest Opera Mini User

by Loy / Wednesday, July 27th, 2011

Nigeria has yet again disrupted the worldwide rankings of Opera Mini usage, as she now becomes the world’s 4th largest user of the Opera Mini browser, according to Opera’s State of the Mobile Web report for June 2011.

Barely three months ago, Nigeria became the 5th largest opera mini user in the world, according to Opera’s report for March 2011. With this new record, Nigeria has displaced Ukraine (now placed 5th) and maintains the number one position in Africa.

Since March 2009, when Nigeria broke into the top 10 countries, she has proved to be a country to watch in mobile web usage and consumption and her recent strides show proof that it could be a long-term trend for mobile browsing in Africa.

Some key highlights

Vanguardngr.com moved up one place to rank 4th, displacing BBC.co.uk, which officially makes Vanguard the most visited news site in Nigeria, especially after kicking out Nairaland as the most visited Nigerian site this month. A major disruption in the history of Nigerian web rankings.

Another notable highlight is the entrant of Jamb.org.ng on the top 10 list of most visited sites on Opera Mini, which ranked 9th in June 2011. Apparently, JAMB (a University’s examinations board) built a light-weight site that is very mobile friendly and loads pretty fast.

Apart from that, a reported 1.49 million candidates wrote the second Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) across the country on Saturday, June 18, 2011, which increased daily access to the website and via the mobile web. In addition, the board released results within a week for the first time and this also increased access to the site via mobile phones and devices.

According to the report, Nigeria saw 464.5% page-view growth since June 2010 and 436.5% unique-user growth since June 2010. Data transfer since June 2010 saw a 424.9 % increase and data transferred per user was 4MB, while page views per user was 338 for June 2011.

The June 2011 report puts a spotlight on the African region where 72 percent of all mobile web users in Africa use the Opera Mini mobile web browser.