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July 09, 2007
Zooming In Opera Mobile Metrics
Opera's sales may not be inspiring to write about but penetration of the mobile market by the Norwegian software company is coming along. Despite the notoriously high barriers to entry in the mobilephone software market, its Mini browser had been downloaded by 15M individuals as of April 2007 and it is getting pre-installed on several new mobilephones. It is also making inroads into set-top boxes and console platforms and higher end smartphones (Opera Mobile).
Its browsers are found in mobilephones from Nokia, Samsung, and a few others. Even the WindowsMobile phone platform uses it (HTC is a customer and it manufactures 70 percent of Windows phones, according to a 1Q07 ir presentation on opera's site pdf file)
We like Opera Mini ourselves and have had various releases installed on an aging Sonyericsson i780 since late 2005. A short stint with or Orange WAP browser last month had us going back Opera in no time.
The Mini browser generates 800M page views a month as of May. If it gets the kind of cpm rates that we get from FM Publishing, then its management will be smiling in a few months.
If it's not making money on that kind of traffic, maybe it should think about buying a mobile advertising startup like Rapid Mobile, the Scottish startup behind Ad360, which so far has managed to elude VC investors and has yet to be acquired, as far as we know - unlike Screentonic over in France, which Microsoft acquired.
Developing the Ad360 interstitial ads platform might be a way of making more money, not that we have any idea if its founders have the venture up for sale, or deeper insight into Opera's strategy than anyone else who can read its investors relations pages .
What we can say is that the stats graphics we snagged are impressive, and that the default Opera Mini-homepage runs Yahoo search bar, which will be a revenue source. It delivers a couple of default news channels and a link to Opera's social network or MyOpera Community, which is growing too. MyOpera counts 850K users as of May and it's Norway's third most popular web-destination, according to Opera.
Posted on July 9, 2007 06:20 AM | Posted to News And Updates | Wireless | Permalink
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