Once again, Opera have released their State of the Mobile Web (SMW) report. The latest report came out this week and has statistics for the month of August 2010. In the previous SMW report that was released for July 2010, Kenya had broken into the top ten of global mobile web countries for Opera Mini usage after passing Nigeria. Kenya maintained its top ten ranking in August 2010 and it looks set to stay there as mobile web usage in Kenya is exploding at all levels (do we have Safaricom to thank for this trend seeing that millions in Kenya now use their mobile data services on GPRS, EDGE and 3G to get online? I should think so!).

What do the Kenya SMW numbers tell us?

Kenya’s SMW status seems to be only getting more consolidated at this juncture and the sky is truly the limit in a country where there are now close to 22 million mobile subscribers to-date. In a nutshell, and by the numbers, the Kenya SMW Report for August 2010 is as follows:

• Page-view growth since August 2009: 270.7 %
• Unique-user growth since August 2009: 157.7 %
• Page-views per user: 795
• Data transferred per user (MB): 8
• Data transferred per page view (KB): 10

Top 10 sites in Kenya (unique users)

1. facebook.com
2. google.com
3. yahoo.com
4. youtube.com (up 5 positions)
5. wikipedia.org (down 4 positions)
6. waptrick.com
7. bbc.co.uk
8. getjar.com (up 9 positions)
9. my.opera.com (down 8 positions)
10. nation.co.ke (new)

Top handsets for August 2010

1. Nokia 2330c
2. Nokia 5130 XpressMusic
3. Nokia 1680c
4. Nokia 2680s
5. Nokia 2700c
6. Nokia 2600c
7. Nokia 3110c
8. Samsung SGH-E250
9. Nokia 2630
10. Nokia 2630

A synopsis of the Kenya SMW Report for August 2010:

There are several very important and truly illuminating trends from the Kenya SMW Report for August 2010. These are as follows:

• Page view growth is almost 300% from a year ago for a current page view per user of an astounding 795 per month! Kenya already leads the continent in total page views per user to-date. In addition, each mobile web users consumes 8 megabytes of content per month! What does this mean? We love to browse the mobile web! The question is what are they looking at and what are we doing about it from a local content perspective? (Hint: time to get on the mobile web sooner rather than later as the audience is already there!).
• Video on the mobile web is exploding in Kenya as YouTube jumped five positions to sit at position 5. Clearly, the rise of 2.5G and 3G shows that Kenyan mobile web users love video content and will go for it when they can get it over lower bandwidth content. (Hint: local mobile video content? What are we doing about it? Ka’ching?!)
• Mobile apps are being consumed voraciously as evidenced by the rise of Getjar into the top ten mobile web sites accessed in Kenya on the mobile web. In addition, as has been the case in the past, Waptrick still holds a strong position in position 6 for free and usually illegal copies of music, ringtones, etc. The writing is on the wall – Kenyans are downloading mobile apps and other content to their phones so the opportunity is truly evident for businesses and developers to get into this space. However, seeing that Nokia and Symbian dominate the mobile OS space in Kenya platforms like OVI and GetJar should be targeted.
• In what put a smile to face, a local mobile web site finally cracked the top ten in Kenya! This is the Nation mobile web site is the first local mobile web site to make it and I would be really keen to see what other local sites are bubbling just under the top ten. I am a little surprised that Safaricom’s mobile portal is not in the top ten yet considering all the marketing that has been done to promote it. I suppose it goes to show that news content will always appeal on any platform? Nation is also one of the most popular web sites on the PC web. Once again, the writing is on the wall – local mobile web content will be consumed provided it exists and known about).
• In terms of handsets, Nokia continues to dominate the handsets that use the mobile web and Opera Mini in Kenya. However, its good to see that Samsung’s e250 has made it in this time round and this could be an indicator that the mix-up is about to change.