The Future of Mobile Web Browsing in Nigeria

Mobile Web has become a global phenomenon. In Africa, more and more Internet users are acccessing the Web everyday via their mobile phones. In South Africa, there are now at least 9,5 million mobile wap users, according to an article in Bizcommunity published by Matthew Buckland.

While South Africa and Egypt lead the way for mobile Web adoption (see Admob Report – Sept. 2008), Nigeria’s mobile web penetration is gradually exploding and might soon replace the traditional web.
Lately, I’ve been following mobile web trends around Africa and I found that Opera’s State Of the Mobile Web Report for September 2008, indicates that traffic from Nigeria (for usage of Opera Mini),
increased by 704.9% and page-view growth increased by 1690.2% since January 2008.

This means that there is a growing number of mobile internet users in Nigeria following mobile trends around the world with a focus on Africa. I also found that my.opera.com was ranked 6th amongst the
top 10 sites by unique users from Nigeria. Thanks to Opera and Admob for these interesting reports.

In fact, according to Admob’s mobile metrics Report for September 2008, the worldwide traffic shows Nigeria on the 7th position in their top 20 list of countries, just below South Africa at 6th place (which
is also in 6th position in Opera’s top 10 Opera Mini users worldwide).
Well, time will tell if this trend would be sustainable in the coming months. My guess is: It will.

Although Neilsen Online doesn’t display mobile web statistics for Nigeria, senior analyst, Kent Ferguson, said that 7.3 million Nigerians accessed the internet using mobile phones during Q2 and Q3
of 2008, while those using PCs drastically slumped to three percent within the same period.

This means that the landscape of mobile web penetration in Nigeria is exploding. In fact, when compared to PC-penetration rates, I think that mobile will be the major platform for the Web in the future, since mobile internet access is cheaper and easily accessible.

Besides, given the wider reach and high-penetration rates of mobile phones in Nigeria, and the seemingly expensive and low penetration of traditional internet access in Nigeria, more and more people would be connecting to the internet via their mobile phones in the nearest
future.

Further, the mobile web trend could surpass internet usage via PCs, as
accessing the internet via mobile phones is faster, cheaper and much
easier. My guess is that, social networking sites would take advantage
of this mobile web trend, and soon we might see mobile social networks
coming from Nigeria.

It would also be interesting to see smart mobile applications or
platforms like Kenya’s Mpesa built with WAP technologies that allow
Nigerian mobile phone users to connect with people via mobile
messaging services.

Loy Okezie, Lagos Nigeria