A new forecast by Juniper Research suggests that ad-funded MMS revenues will reach $87 million over the next five years, with annual growth rates reaching 94%.
In addition, the forecast also states that SMS and mobile email will continue to dominate the person-to-person (p2p) mobile messaging market during the same time period. The basis for the forecast being that the number of brands using MMS as an advertising medium is still growing rapidly, with push MMS and SMS in particular being employed very effectively in both mature and emerging markets. This alone has enabled network operators to support ad-funded voice and SMS tariffs and combat falling ARPU, while providing brands with new advertising channels along the way.
The findings indicate that the Far East and China will lead the global ad-funded MMS market by a considerable margin, followed by North America and Western Europe respectively. It’s nice to see the North American market leading a segment of mobile technology, which doesn’t seem tot happen very often.
Other interesting tidbits from the forecast titled “Mobile Messaging & IP Evolution” is that the number of mobile email users will climb by 21% to reach 1.1 billion in 2014, and that SMS’ share of total global P2P mobile messaging revenues will decline by 18% over the same five-year forecast period. With the evolution of MMS-capable devices and the services that utilize them, SMS is slowly being taken over by its multimedia counterpart- a shift that’s been coming for a while now.
