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Comment by jahewson | Hacker News Reader

> There are a lot of markets where Opera has 10, 20, or 30% share.

As there are so many would you mind listing a few?

As highlighted by my comment, it's middle and eastern Europe :

Ukraine 20% (36%), Slovakia 6% (13%), Poland 7% (12%), Czech Republic 5% (10%), Russia 14% (32%), Belarus 32% (45%), Kazachstan 32% (16%)

Also, Mobile browsers are not insignificant market: (whole) Europe 24% (50%)

Numbers from statcounter.com as of January 2013 (January 2010). I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide. And FF was well established at the time, so it didn't carve much to the Opera's share.

Those are all immature web markets. By the time the majority of web users in those countries spend a significant amount of money online, they probably wont be using Opera anymore. If you're looking for more file-sharing users, sure, target these markets. But if you want to make money today then don't waste your time. (I've lived in, started/run businesses, and produced web products in Eastern Europe).

thank god for people like you who spread the word about how you can't make money on the web in those markets :) all I can say that you did not try hard enough :)

The European mobile web market is 'immature'. #shithnsays

Not what I meant at all. I just meant that in my experience, the counties listed have relatively low median disposable incomes, and are generally not inclined to pay for web products.

Have you ever heard about ads?

Why wouldn't they be using Opera anymore? They will be used to Opera, and the brand will be well known to most people.

Why do you think Google is desperate to enter these markets right now?

>I picked 2010 as it was about the time Chrome started it's push around here (I'm in Czech Republic at the moment) - ads in radio, tv, outdoors, on homepages of google.com, youtube.com; Opera was often blocked from accessing gmail, apps,; was deprived of features (by user-agent sniffing) google-wide

I think by far the biggest impact was bundling Chrome and autoinstalling it with Java and Flash updates. Google must have paid top dollar for it which Firefox and Opera had no chance of matching.

Russia. Was 20%+ last year, now 10%+ http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-RU-monthly-201201-201301 Or Belarus 30%+: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-BY-monthly-201201-201301

And Britain at 20% (was surprized myself!) http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser-GB-monthly-201208-201301

Edit: my bad, the graph probably didn't refresh properly

20% in the UK would surprise me too, but that graph shows Opera at 0.56%, and seemingly declining.

StatCounter is a terrible source for anything outside of North America and Western Europe.

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