India is ranked top in terms of highest number of monthly Opera Mini users worldwide. In
a recent State of the Mobile Web report, Opera gave a closer look at mobile web trends in the country. It also looks in to the rapidly emerging e-commerce business in India. The analysis report revealed that for international web sites, such as Google search, Facebook and others, usage remains consistently high all over India. Last year a major shift was seen towards e-commerce and travel websites. Further breakdown of the top Indian domains discloses that one category stands out from the crowd. It’s the News portal, both Indian and international. Traditionally, they are favorite among the Indian mobile surfers and that’s the reason they mostly remain on top. But now it seems that some new entries are emerging as challenger on the top lists of popular website categories. One of them is E-commerce, which has evolved into become the the second largest website category in the list of top Indian domains. The present e-commerce category has got more different domains in the list as compared to the social-networking category. The domains present under e-commerce includes two portals. One where people actually stop and do financial transactions and second that offers price-comparison of products across shopping portals. Another category which has increased in numbers and has become more diversified than before is the travel. If we look in to the the regional websites’ top-five lists, we’ll see that the Indian Railways is still hugely popular. Not only that, it is also joined by some other travel-booking sites in the domain list, compared to what was seen in summer 2010, such as MakeMyTrip, Yatra and Cleartrip.
An analysis done on top 200 domains exhibits that news websites contributes to 30% of the total visits, e-commerce 14%, social networking 9%, education 7% and travel 6.5%. Some key findings derived from the report:
- E-commerce is flying high, with Quikr, Amazon and Flipkart being the top three e-commerce sites.
- Mobile customizing services are gaining momentum in India, with sites like Zedge and Mobile9 consistently making to the top 10 lists of international sites.
- With India being a cricket crazy nation, sites like Cricbuzz.com and ESPNcricinfo.com often rank in international top 10 lists.
The data is complied in an anonymous and aggregated manner, accumulated from surfing habits of Opera Mini mobile web browser users in India during the month of September 2012. To view the whole report on India surfing habits and top web categories, click here.
