eMarketer has released their take on the future of the mobile content, the demand will grow, mobile web access will skyrocket, and mobile content providers should have learned from the web to pursue paid content.
Over the
next several years, three major trends will fuel increasing demand for
mobile content in the US: A growing number of mobile Internet users, a
dramatic increase in the amount of money they spend on data plans and
continued growth in smartphone sales.
eMarketer estimates that 68.6 million users will log on to the
mobile Web at least once per month in 2009. By 2013, that number will
increase to 126.2 million people.
In the short term, publishers will be emboldened to monetize mobile
content through subscriptions, a la carte fees and other transactions
rather than assume that advertising revenues alone will support their
emerging mobile businesses. Having learned tough lessons from
monetization experiments on the web, content owners are determined to
approach the mobile arena with a direct-revenue mindset.
A key difference between the online and mobile platforms, however, is
that handheld screens are inherently limited by their size, whereas PC
displays offer more real estate for creative ad formats. On the mobile
front, the lack of opportunities for ad monetization may leave paid
models as the only viable alternative, thereby presenting an
opportunity for paid-content providers.
"We will see experiments with fee-based content over mobile
networks," said Paul Verna, eMarketer senior analyst and author of the
report, "Mobile Content: Paid Models Take Shape."