No Official Usage Figures are available with respect to use and attitude trends for Mobile in India. Opera Mini has just released their report, which looks at top trends across countries keeping in mind mobile consumption habits.

The biggest trend is that Social Networking stands supreme - Almost 40% of traffic worldwide is to social networks. In some countries, such as the United States, South Africa and Indonesia, the social Web accounts for more than 60% of the traffic. Internationally, it has also been seen that full Web surfing comprises more than 77% of all traffic. Content on WAP and .mobi sites accounted for 23% of mobile Web traffic. This share continues to decline as more consumers both use Opera Mini to access rich Web content and become more comfortable browsing the Web on their phones.

One must keep in mind however, that this is an International. Indian users are more happy having a ‘guided’ experience, which is why service providers are happy being content providers and creating walled gardens at this point of time. But that is unlikely to last.

This shows that Indian users too, as they gain in confidence, will look at beaking the Walled Gardens – and there’s not much that operators can do. They should infact start encouraging use because that will effectively mean that more data is consumed, and this will increase revenues per user (this currently stands at something like $7 - $8 per user in India). The report also says that consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.

44 Million have used Opera Mini so far – so it’s a reasonably big sample size.

 Here is the snapshot for India

    * India favors social networking, with nearly half (48.9%) of all traffic going to social networks.

Top 10 sites in India

India

   1. www.orkut.com

   2. www.google.com

   3. in.m.yahoo.com

   4. www.peperonity.com

   5. gallery.mobile9.com

   6. www.mocospace.com

   7. www.160by2.com

   8. www.mobango.com (noticed that they are spending huge amounts on campaigns    in Facebook – but then why isn’t Facebook on this list?)

   9. www.itsmy.com

  10. www.indianrail.gov.in

 The mix is quite perplexing. Apart from a few – not many are popular web properties. So is there a specific way to market these websites to mobile users? Anyone with some insights can possibly share. How does one drive traffic to mobile oriented sites?

I wouldn’t consider this data to be entirely accurate. The report does not state how many people are a part of the India sample. For something as diverse as mobile, taking the stats of one browser is like shooting in thin air. Keep in mind that 44 million people have used Opera Mini so far; so the Indian users are likely to be 1/20^th of that number. And the number of people accessing internet through mobile is anywhere between 36 – 40 Million.

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