As part of their monthly reports on the mobile Web, Opera has released their June 2008 stats breaking down usage of their mobile web browser – Opera Mini – across 10 countries and 100 sites. It’s not the most encompassing of studies but it does throw some light on mobile usage, specifically in India.

Before we take a look at the numbers, let’s establish the boundaries of the study. The countries in the report were selected as per Opera Mini usage so there is a skew here. Also, while Opera claims to be the “the world’s most popular mobile browser”, that means little in absolute mobile browser market share. The sex and age demographics were sketched based on random and voluntary user participation in surveys. The sites included in the study were tracked according to page views in each country.

With that in mind, let’s take a look at the numbers. Note that we are dealing in percentages, no actual figures were shared.

In the ten countries examined, male users of Opera Mini greatly outnumber female users. The biggest difference in usage between males and females is in India, where 97.2% of people using Opera Mini to browse the Web are males. Maybe, only males found the need to adjucate their sex.

Globally, 13.4% of Opera Mini users are under 18 years of age, 64.5% are 18-27 years of age, 16.7% are 28-37 years of age, 4.4% are 38-47 years of age, and 1% is more than 48 years of age.

In India, the majority of Opera Mini users are 18-27 years old—75.7%

As in China, the vast majority of Opera Mini users in India are male (~97%)

India also has the lowest percentage (5.6%) of Opera Mini users who are under 18 years old

-- Top 10 sites in India (# of unique users)
1. google.com
2. orkut.com
3. yahoo.com
4. gmail.com
5. rediff.com
6. youtube.com
7. gamejump.com
8. wikipedia.org
9. information.com
10. my.opera.com

-- User demographics
Male 97.2%
Female 2.8%

<18 5.6%
18-27 75.7%
28-37 13.8%
38-47 3.8%
48+ 1.0%

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