In its new report, Juniper Research talks about the prospects of mobile instant messaging (IM) services, forecasting that the number of users will exceed 1.3 billion by 2016. In other words, that’s three times more users than last year — the growth that will be driven by the arrival of new services, such as Apple’s iMessage, and continued growth of existing services like AOL’s AIM, Blackberry Messenger, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger. Moreover, messaging service providers also have increased smartphone adoption to thank for this impressive growth, as well as low-cost data packages and the development of high speed mobile networks.
While some IM services are ad-funded, most are viewed by the operators as customer retention tools, with the only cost to the user being the data usage charged. However, Juniper says that despite its strengths, mobile IM won’t de-crown SMS, due to its ubiquity and ease of use.
Some other findings from the report include:
- Premium-rate SMS and MMS will decline due to challenges from other forms of billing/delivery.
- MMS traffic and revenue will continue to grow, but A2P (Application-to-Person) MMS will not have as bigger impact as A2P SMS.
- Mobile email adoption will continue as the number of handsets with QWERTY keyboards, Internet access and larger screens increase.
As usual, you can get additional details on Juniper’s report titled “Mobile Messaging Markets: SMS, MMS, IM & Email Strategies 2011-2016” from their website.