Revenues from premium mobile messaging will exceed those from online advertising by 2006, according to a new study from Jupiter Research.
The report predicts that while internet advertising revenues will total E3.1 billion in four years time, the premium mobile messaging market will be worth E4.6 billion.
Jupiter emphasised that SMS messages will continue to dominate messaging revenues for the foreseeable future. Multimedia messaging is unlikely to penetrate the mass market until the cost of handsets has fallen and the service infrastructure has been fully developed.
By 2005, European consumer spending on mobile messaging is predicted to total E22.2 billion but only 18% of this will come from MMS. Jupiter believes that telecoms operators should concentrate on promoting premium SMS as a precursor to multimedia messaging. This market should be worth E2.9 million in three years time.
Despite the advances in mobile technology, person-to-person SMS will continue to account for the majority of mobile messaging traffic as far as 2007. However, Jupiter forecasts that annual MMS traffic will climb to 21.4 billion messages by that stage as users acquire and familiarize themsleves with photo-enabled handsets.
