Mobile content revenues to grow exponentially to 2009.

According to an article (Mobile revenue to top $1bn by 2009, AAP) in The Sydney Morning Herald, revenues from mobile content (mobile phones) in Australia are set to explode, exceeding a fantastic $1 billion on 2009.

Revenues from Australian mobile content were $129 million in 2004, with personalisation services such as mobile phone wallpapers and ring tones accounting for 69%.

Based on study by Frost & Sullivan, the key areas of mobile content growth will be entertainment, enterprise applications and productivity services; adult services are considered entertainment in the study, and are predicted to be one of the biggest movers (122% growth).

Also mentioned is the growth of high-bandwidth applications and mobile content (3G (and 4G?) such as mobile video, predicted to account for 13% of US revenues by 2009.

There are a variety of obvious factors behind the growth including bandwidth (3G) and increasing demand from ever-savvier consumers.

The article concludes by predicted the challenge for the industry being establishing sustainable and successful business models; 1999, here we come again!

At Wiliam, we have followed the emergence and growth of the mobile content industry, and have developed a number of mobile applications with Vodafone Australia in the past year; only a few weeks back, we completed a project with client Mogenic, where we integrated our Content Management System sitedock with the Vodafone MMS gateway to allow participants to submit their MMS photos (mobile phone photos) directly to the Mogenic website.

In fact, several of our current websites in production are being built in xHTML, allowing for easier portability of content to mobile phones.

I suspect that within six months, all of our content will be mobile-ready, and that within twelve months, clients will place emphasis on mobile optimisation of their content.