4mobithinkIn June 2012 mobiThinking published an interesting overview of the essential compendium of need-to-know statistics, focusing on volumes of SMS, MMS, mobile email and IM; messaging revenues; OTT messaging services; A2P; mobile ad expenditure and top mobile ad networks.

We‘ve pulled out the information relevant to SMS marketing for your convenience:

SMS - the king of mobile messaging

  • Portio Research (Febuary 2012): 7.8 trillion SMS trillion messages were sent in 2011 and SMS traffic is expected to reach 9.6 trillion in 2012;
  • By 2013 worldwide SMS revenue is forecast to break the USD 150 billion mark for the first time and will continue to grow for the next two years;
  • Portio says: “SMS is not dead. SMS is still the king and will remain so for some time to come”;
  • Informa (May 2012): 5.9 trillion SMS messages were sent in 2011 and SMS traffic is expected to reach 9.4 trillion messages by 2016 - however, Informa forecasts that SMS’ share of global mobile messaging traffic will fall from 64.1% in 2011 to 42.1% in 2016, as it loses share to mobile instant messaging (IM).

Mobile email, instant messaging and MMS

Portio Research (Febuary 2012):

  • 669.5 million people used mobile email in 2011, this is expected to grow to 2.4 billion by 2016;
  • 207 billion MMS were sent in 2011, rising to 276.8 million in 1016;
  • Mobile IM is used by 7.9% of mobile subscribers, this is projected to rise to 30.9% in 2016.

Informa (May 2012):

  • Global mobile IM traffic (from operators and OTT providers) will increase from 1.6 trillion messages in 2011 to 7.7 trillion messages in 2016, doubling its share of global messaging traffic from 17.1% in 2011 to 34.6% in 2016.
  • In 2016, 387.5 billion MMS will be sent, representing 1.7% of global messaging traffic.

Juniper Research (June 2011):

Mobile IM users will exceed 1.3 billion by 2016: “While IM services have some advantages, such as real-time communication and apparent absence of cost, the market is fragmented by different services [AOL’s AIM, Blackberry Messenger, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger] which cannot communicate with each other.”

Global messaging revenues

Portio Research (Febuary 2012) forecasted that the worldwide mobile messaging market is worth US$202 billion in 2011, rising to $310.2 billion in 2016. Asia Pacific generated the highest mobile messaging revenues last year. In 2011, the main contributors to messaging revenues were SMS 63.5%; MMS 15.3%; Mobile email 16.2% and mobile IM 5.0%.

Informa (May 2012) predicts that the IM market will be worth US$16 billion in 2016, of which mobile operators will take 54% of revenues and OTT messaging service providers, such as WhatsApp and iMessage), will take 46%. Also in 2016, mobile e-mail will generate $32 billion in revenues and MMS $20.7 billion.

The impact of OTT messaging services

Portio Research (Febuary 2012): Over-the-Top (OTT) messaging traffic hit 3.5 trillion messages in 2011 and will continue to grow at a CAGR of 42.2% and reaching 20.3 trillion by the end of 2016. But SMS traffic (and revenue) will continue to grow.

OTT messaging services, also referred to as next-generation messaging services, offer Web-based messaging services to mobile users who subscribe to the same service (and/or use the same handset). Assuming the customer has a flat-rate mobile Web package these messages are free or almost free. While these services are often earning negligible revenue for the OTT service providers, they are taking messaging revenues from operators as well as contributing to ever increasing data traffic on mobile networks.

Ovum (April 2012) predicts that network operators will lose $23bn in mobile messaging revenue in 2012, as they lose custom to IP-based (OTT) social messaging services such as KakaoTalk (South Korea), WhatsApp and Facebook.

Over-the-Top (OTT) messaging v SMS messaging.

 

OTT messages

SMS messages

MMS messages

2011

3492 billion

7844 billion

207 billion

2012

5846 billion

8600 billion

228 billion

2016

20,293 billion

9554 billion

277 billion

Sources: Portio Research Febuary 2012

via: mobiThinking

Application-to-person (A2P) messaging

Juniper Research (May 2011): By 2016, application-to-person (A2P) messaging will overtake person-to-person (texting) messaging, being worth more than US$70bn.

A2P messaging includes messages to or from an application to or from a large number of customers in financial services, advertising, marketing, business administration, ticketing, television voting etc.

Expenditure on mobile advertising and marketing worldwide

Global expenditure on mobile ads (search, display and messaging) in 2011 was US$5.3 billion, according to IAB and IHS Screen Digest (June 2012).

Search draws in the most revenue with $3.3 billion and expenditure in Asia exceeds North America and Europe.

2011: Mobile ad spend in US$million, according to IAB and IHS Screen Digest

Region

Display

Search

Messaging

Total

Europe

367

900

114

1,380

North America

572

811

295

1,677

Latin America

31

74

83

188

Asia/Pacific

491

1,384

41

1,916

Middle East & Africa

44

124

4

172

Global

1,504

3,292

536

5,333

Source: IAB and IHS Screen Digest (June 2012)

via: mobiThinking

mobiThinking note: Definitions of the mobile advertising market vary, some estimates include mobile messaging alongside search and display ads – e.g. IAB (above) – some do not – e.g. Gartner (further below) - which leads to some discrepancy between data.

Mobile Advertising Revenue by Region, Worldwide, 2010-2015 (Millions of Dollars), according to Gartner

Region

2010

2011

2015

North America

3.043

7.017

5,791

Western Europe

2.571

5.693

5,132

Asia/Pacific and Japan

8.688

1,629

6,925

Rest of the World

1.969

4.104

2,762

Total

1,627

3,310

20,610

Source: Gartner (June 2011)

via: mobiThinking

Global expenditure on mobile ads is forecast to double every year to US$20.6 billion in 2015, according to Gartner (June, 2012), from an estimated $3.3 billion in 2011.

  • Search ads and location ads (paid-for positioning on maps and augmented reality apps) will deliver the highest revenue, while video/audio ads will see the fastest growth through 2015;
  • Brand spending on mobile advertising will grow from 0.5% of the total advertising budget in 2010 to over 4% in 2015;
  • Asia will continue to dominate global mobile ad spend, but to a lessening degree from 49.2% of mobile ad revenue in 2011 to 33.6% in 2015.

Strategy Analytics (April 2012): Advertiser expenditure on mobile media is expected to almost double from US$6.3 billion in 2011 to $11.6 billion in 2012. The US is expected to be the fastest growing mobile ad market with a $4.2 billion spent in 2012. In the US revenue from in-app advertising exceeds revenue from mobile Web display.

ABI Research (June 2011): Global expenditure on mobile advertising is forecast to exceed US$7 billion in 2012 and by 2016 $24 billion will be spent on mobile advertising (which is the same amount as is spent on online advertising in 2011). (Source: mobithinking.com)

By MediaBUZZ