There were over 13.3 million handsets in Cote D’Ivoire in 2010 with Nokia taking a 40.9 per cent share of the market and Samsung at a far 17.1 percent. Across Nigeria, Ghana and Cote D’Ivoire, Opera’s Opera Mini is the most used mobile browser – just like it is across Africa.

Dive into the Infographic to get more stats.[Click to enlarge]

Source: TechLoy

Mobile dating service, Eskimi has released its recent numbers. The service has reached a milestone of 10 million users with Nigeria its largest user base at 5 million users.

According to Opera Mini, Eskimi is the second most visited website for mobile internet users in Nigeria. Ahead of Google and Yahoo. Opera Mini is currently the country’s most used browser.

In May this year, Eskimi had just over 3.5 million Nigerian users. Its current numbers in Nigeria show a growth of about 42 percent within 6 months.

Eskimi says, its users spend an average of 6.5 hours on its service every month as it continues to partner with brands across Africa to promote their products and even run crowdsourcing campaigns.

The mobile social network was launched in 2010 by Lithuanian, Vytas Paukstys. It then gained traction in Nigeria and has spread to the rest of Africa.

Nairaland, for the first time ever, has released its numbers to the public. In a Nairaland post by founder Seun Osewa, Nairaland is getting a total of over 26 million impressions and is dumping Google’s AdSense.

In the month of September, Nairaland saw 12,500,698 impressions from Personal Computers and 13,544,242 from mobile users. This means PC impressions were an average of 403,248 daily and mobile impressions were an average of 436,911 daily.

Nairaland Ads

The Nairaland founder says they will run 10 banner ad slots at N10,000 daily per slot. Below are example stats for an ad by Daily Post.

The Problem

The difference between these Nairaland Ads and Google Adwords and Adsense is targeting. Nairaland ads are targeted to Nairaland readers which is a very wide demographic to target. The ads aren’t targeted by context, interests, age group, gender or location in comparison to Google’s Adwords, Facebook ads and other ad platforms.

There’s also no analytic dashboard for you to analyse data. All advertisers get to know is that they’re running a certain number of ads and getting a certain number of clicks from which a click-through-rate can be gotten.

It’ll also be great if advertisers could spend more flexible amounts.

Seems like Nairaland should have waited a while and worked on a proper product before launching this.

There’s obviously a large room for improvement in analytics on its ad service. After the post on Nairland, Seun Osewa says there will be a way for people to run ads on Nairaland for N5,000

It will soon be possible to advertise on Nairaland for less than 5,000 naira a day. I’ll make the announcement very soon.

— Seun Osewa (@seunosewa) October 8, 2012

What do you think about Nairaland’s new ad service.

In a new report from IDC, Google’s Android OS accounts for 68.1 percent  of all smartphones sold in the second quarter of 2012. Android and iOS accounted for 85 percent of the entire smartphone market, leaving RIM’s BlackBerry and Symbian with 4.8 percent and 4.4 percent respectively.

In a statement from IDC, Ramon Llamas, senior research analyst with Mobile Phone Technology and Trends program says “The market was entreated to several flagship models from Android’s handset partners, prices were well within reach to meet multiple budgetary needs, and the user experience from both Google and its handset partners boosted Android smartphones’ utility far beyond simple telephony” .

Android definitely got support from its wide range of OEMs especially Samsung, which accounted for 44 percent of all Android phones sold. Demand for Apple’s iPhone has slowed due to rumors and speculations of a new iPhone in the third quarter of the year.

Compared to Q2 of 2011, Symbian has seen a 62.9 percent drop – its sharpest year-over-year drop ever.  Windows based mobile phones  however gained market share to place  fifth with 3.5 percent of smartphone market share in Q2 of 2012.

Android is definitely going to continue rising as more OEMs produce Android-based devices. iOS on the other hand will rise when a new iPhone hits the market.

Source: Mashable via IDC

Here’s a video from Praekelt Foundation that takes us into mobile web stats across Africa.

Did you know that the average sub-saharan woman touches her hair seven times a day? In 1994, Nigeria had only 100,000 landlines. The number of active phone lines in Nigeria crossed 100 Million early this month. Also, the most popular phone in Africa in 1994 weighed 500grams and cost $2000. Watch the video below for more stats.

Uganda has more mobile phones than light bulbs!

Founded in early 2007, Praekelt Foundation builds open source, scalable mobile technologies and solutions to improve the health and well-being of people living in poverty. Their programmes have reached over 50 million people across 15 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Source: Praekelt Foundation, YouTube

Last year, we reported that  mobile web browsing in Nigeria overtook desktop browsing for an entire month. It’s been 9 months since we’ve been tracking the numbers and mobile browsing has continued to eclipse desktop browsing in Nigeria. All figures are StatCounter’s public stats and are largely based on its embed codes placed on millions of blogs and websites worldwide.

Mobile users now account for 57.36 percent of all internet activity while desktop users account for 42.64 percent down from 51.34 percent in September 2011. Mobile activity is up from 48.66 percent in September 2011. The reason for this is simple: Our 21st century lifestyle require us to be on the move a lot, I’ve never brought out my laptop while I’m on the road. It’s always my mobile phone. Always. The initial draft for this post was done on mobile.

Mobile Browsers

Opera’s fleet of mobile browsers continue to lead the mobile market but has dropped from 90.53 percent in September 2011 to 83.1 percent in July 2012. On the other hand, Nokia’s native browser has gained market share from 5.81 percent in September 11 to 8.21 percent in July 2012. This might be due to a speed increase in Nokia’s native browsers.

Android Browser continues to struggle as UC Browser gains 5.92 percent of the mobile browser market share.

Desktop Browsers

Safari  accounts for 7.5 percent of all desktop browsing as Firefox versions retain supremacy of a total market share of 46.19 percent. Internet Explorer is seeing a decline to 23.09 percent, Chrome goes up to 17.7 percent as Opera carries last at 3.45 percent.

Social Media

Facebook remains the leader in the social networking space although it currently seems to be on a downward trend. Facebook accounts for 85.69 percent of all social networking activity, Twitter accounts for 6.78 percent.

Desktop OSes

On the Desktop OS side, Windows XP and Windows Vista are seeing a sharp drop in market share as Windows 7 continues to rise. Windows 7 accounts for 54.69 percent of all desktop web activity, while windows XP and Vista account for 26.37 percent and 8.33 percent respectively. Mac users are at the bottom of the food chain as iOS seems to be on a continuous rise.
We’re not sure why StatCounter segments iOS under desktop browsers.

Mobile OSes

For mobile OSs, Nokia’s Series 40 has seen a sharp rise in the last four months, accounting for 46.43 percent of all mobile web activity, as Symbian declines into 24.25 percen11t.

This seems weird but it turns out Android stands at 2.43 percent of all web traffic and the BlackBerry at 1.17 percent. The market segmentation of Android phones and their price differences can account for this.

Search Engines

Google accounts for 90.2 percent of internet searches from Nigeria. Yahoo and Bing have been on a decline in the last four months. For mobile search, Google accounts for a comfortable 99.3 percent of all mobile searches.

What Does This Mean?

It means everyone who’s launching anything internet based as of now, needs to focus on the mobile users as mobile is currently a larger market than desktop users.

For more insight on mobile usage across Africa, read: Facts And Stats From Mobile Web West Africa

Latest statistics from the Nigerian Communications Commision(NCC) show that Nigeria has crossed the 100 million mark in number of active phone lines. Mobile Telcos MTN, Glo, Airtel and Etisalat had 94,273,460 mobile phone lines by the end of Q1 2012. CDMA networks on the other hand split the remainder of the 4,871,553 fixed lines.

MTN continues to lead with 42,898,581 active lines within Q1 while Globacom placed second with 20,846,604 active lines. Airtel now places third with 18,600,453 lines while the newest entrant Etisalat can boast of of 11,927,840 active lines.

The GSM networks are definitely kicking the butt of CDMA companies as they have continued to upgrade and provide cheaper services.

In Q3 2011, CDMA networks saw losses with active lines dropping from 5,558,612 at the beginning of the quarter to 5,215,131 at the end. By the end of 2011 however, CDMA networks had lost even more subscribers and stood at 4,601,070 lines.

The bearish trend continued in 2012, with CDMA networks having 4,410,141 active lines in January and 4,031,698 active lines in March.

It’s important to note that as much as CDMA networks seem to have lower call and texting rates, network coverage across Nigeria is poor as most of them have coverage only in major cities.

Do you use a CDMA or GSM line? Please leave us a comment

Source: Technology TImes Online

Dating service, Eskimi has reached 3.5 Million users in Nigeria according to stats made available to us by them. This makes Nigerians almost half the entire userbase of 7.3 Million registered Eskimi users.  In March, the service had 2.5 million Nigerians out of its 5 Million userbase.

“These are exciting times in Eskimi, as we are growing faster every day – we have grown more than 1 million new customers last month,” said Eskimi CEO Vytas Paukstys in a press release.

An average of 200,000 unique users access Eskimi on a daily basis. Total logins from Nigeria total over 1 Million.

On the pageviews side, Nigerian Eskimi users view over 10,000+ pages, spending more than 50 minutes on the site everyday. 90 percent of users access the site via their mobile phones. Only 10 percent login via a PC.

Across Africa, Eskimi is also seeing growth (everyone does what the Nigerians do B)). Its userbase in Ghana has risen to 500,000, 210,000 in South Africa, 120,000 for Kenya and 50,000 for Tanzania. See the image below for other African countries.

Looking deeper into its Nigerian stats, the largest distribution of Eskimi Users is within the 18-24 age group. Followed closely by the 25-34 age group. 18-24 year olds account for 47.4 percent of the userbase while the 25-34 year olds account for 33.5 percent of all registered accounts.

Lagos is where about 37.1 percent of Eskimi users live. Far behind and next on the list is Ibadan with 8.3 percent of the total user base. Abeokuta and Abuja are on the heels of the Ibadan P Setters. Checkout the image below for Eskimi’s distribution across the country.
Eskimi is certainly on the heels of Facebook in terms of its Nigerian userbase. P Setting is serious business.

According to Analysys, Android’s market share of sales doubled from 33.6% to 68.45% which puts Android ahead of Apple. iOS device sales increased from 4.1% to 5.7%.

Android has taken the top spot from Nokia which has seen sales drop by more than half. Nokia’s currently banking on its Windows Phone powered Lumia 800C.

Analysys’ report contradicts Statcounter’s finding which stated that Android was about to take over Nokia’s top spot. Considering that these reports are subjective to different measurements, but they show a consistent trend in Android growth.

Android has continued to grow over the years due to the wide range of devices, available at different prices.

Source: TNW