Opera News 200M Milestone Highlights Opera’s Strong Position in Africa

By Jorgen Arnesen, EVP mobile browsers

Earlier this week, we announced that Opera News had reached 200 million monthly active users in May. This was quite an impressive achievement, and in large part was driven by Opera News doubling its users in Africa over the past year.

Specifically, this was driven by the expansion of Opera News Hub, our content creation platform, to five additional countries in Africa; the launch of Opera News Lite, a downsized version of the Opera News application that enables users to access the Opera News service in a less data intensive way; and Opera News becoming a critical information source during the Coronavirus outbreak.

While we’ve had a lot of success with Opera News and our mobile browser products in Africa over the last year, we’re even more excited about the future. A couple reasons for our enthusiasm include: 

• Africa has the fastest growing internet population in the world and online advertising and ecommerce will grow meaningfully as the 1.3 billion people on the continent increasingly shift offline activities online.
• Our increasing relationships with major mobile internet service providers in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda and Zambia, which include MTN, Airtel, AirtelTigo and Safaricom, where we have made it easier for users to access Opera Mini and Opera News on those networks by providing up to 50MB of free data per day. This effort will further position Opera as the gateway to the Internet in Africa.
• The recent upgrade of Opera Mini will allow us to build on the mobile browser user growth in Africa we’ve seen over the last year. Specifically, Opera Mini has a fully revamped user interface and it will enable us to more effectively launch and deliver new features specific to the African market, setting the groundwork for increased user engagement.

To summarize, I am very excited about Opera News hitting 200 million monthly active users and the progress we’ve made over the last twelve months - and looking forward to speaking about what comes next.

Thanks.

Jorgen Arnesen