MMS Revenues Will Disappoint
The big hype for the past year or so in the wireless industry has been about how MMS would be the big revenue generator for the next few years. I’ve argued against this a few times, pointing out that while there are applications for MMS that seem valuable, they aren’t likely to catch on in the same way that SMS did. Now, Datamonitor has finally put out a report throwing some cold water on carriers who are drooling over all that MMS revenue. They expect that revenue from MMS will be much lower than expected over the next few years. Worse, SMS revenues will start to decline as other technologies begin to overtake it. However, none of them will bring in the same sorts of revenue going forward. The report recommends that the carriers offer real instant messaging and email, as that’s more likely to find users at this stage of the game. Of course, knowing how the mobile carriers tend to operate, they’re probably just going to keep the prices on everything high, so that no one sees much of a reason to adopt anything.
