Mobile web use exploding; Opera confused by Generation Y

It’s near the end of the month, which means another State of the Mobile Web report from Opera. As the most-used mobile web browser in the world, they get a pretty good overview of the entire from month to month – and during October, overall access of the internet from mobile phones continued to grow. Also, Opera attempted to categorise “Generation Y”, and came away scratching their heads.

Is Opera Mobile really the biggest?

If StatCounter is to be believed, then yes:  StatCounter Global Stats – Mobile Browser Market Share

What are the main points in the report?

• Back in August, there were 66.5 million people using Opera Mobile around the world. That number has now risen to 76.3 million – an increase of over 90% compared to last year.
• The number of pages viewed through the browser in October this year was 41.6 billion – compared to 17.2 billion during October last year.
• While Apple and Blackberry dominate the top 10 devices used to access the internet in America, outside of the USA it’s mostly dominated by Nokia. Although that domination has been in less evidence than it was two months ago.

There was a lot of information about “Generation Y” or “millienials” in this report. Opera wanted to look at the lifestyle of Generation Y and see what key lessons could be learned about them. As it turns out, there aren’t really any key lessons. The take-home points that Opera learned are:

• There is a vast amount of diversity of lifestyles amongst Generation Y. You can’t really make accurate generalizations.
  That diversity becomes even more profound when you start looking at different countries.

What we think?

The continued growth of mobile web use isn’t really news these days – it has been expanding steadily for quite some time now. But the Generation Y stuff is interesting. So it turns out that when a stroppy teen shouts “you can’t DEFINE me!” they’re actually right. It looks like those trying to target the tech-savvy millennial market are going to have to go beyond traditional broad demographics, and invest more heavily in individualizing their targeting. You can see our recent guest article The Six Key Mobile App Metrics you need to be tracking for some ideas on what metrics are useful in mobile.