The 10 most popular UK mobile sites are…

Opera has been touting its latest research into the state of the mobile web and aside from pointing out that Opera Mini is now the most used mobile browser out there, it’s been taking a look at some of the content preferences for mobile surfers.

Here’s what the report says:

Tracking the type of content across the top 100 sites visited by all Opera Mini users, we find:
• Social networking is popular worldwide and is the leading source of Web traffic for mobile devices.
• Successful sites on the Web find users on mobile phones, further underscoring the emergence of One Web.
• Consumers desire a rich Web experience regardless of the device they use to access the Web. WAP continues to diminish as more-capable Web browsers are able to display full Web content on mobile phones.
• Nearly a quarter of all traffic is headed to content portals or search engines.

While none of the conclusions are surprising in themselves, it’s interesting to note that most of traffic is users going directly to a site, rather than via their operator’s content portal. Does this mean that the operator portal is set to die off in popularity in the same way the likes of Lycos and AOL portals did as the fixed web matured?

Opera’s report has also got some useful country-by-country comparisons. Here’s the UK section:

The United Kingdom is the world leader in mobile e-mail, although that number remains small. More than 11% of traffic in Q1 was to Web-based e-mail services.

1. www.facebook.com
2. www.google.co.uk
3. www.live.com
4. www.bebo.com
5. www.mocospace.com
6. news.bbc.co.uk
7. uk.yahoo.com
8. www.itsmy.com
9. www.faceparty.com
10. www.ebay.co.uk

The full report’s here.