The market for ringtones and logos will be non-existent in 2005
Many people only associate the market for premium mobile services with ringtones and logos, believing that there is little else out there that is making any money on mobile services for content owners.
While this was true a year or two ago, as premium mobile services were introduced around Europe, that picture is changing dramatically, says Strand Consultin its latest report.

According to the report which is based on today's actual traffic figures from operators and content owners in Europe, ringtones and logos account for 39% of the total value of the market for mobile services and will turnover Euro 638 million in 2002. The total market value for all mobile services in Europe in 2002 will be 1.65 billion Euro.

But the 39% share of the market in 2002 will drop to a share of only 2.7% in 2005, as the many other services already available today - together with new services using new technologies like MMS and Java are introduced in the coming years.

However, we have a lot to thank ringtones and logos for and indeed, some countries that are still in the early stages of offering their first premium mobile services have an extremely well proven business case that simply kick-starts the mobile services market and shows mobile consumers how they can buy mobile services and use them on their mobile phone.

If the mobile operators and content owners only had the results from the launch of mobile services on WAP to go by, the market for mobile services could have been set back by years. This partly due to the lack of revenue sharing models from the operators for WAP services, taking any initiative from content owners to create innovative WAP services, but also due to the actual WAP experience compared to the expectations that the mobile users had been bombarded with.

Premium SMS services all have revenue sharing models, so that the content owners and the mobile operators have agreed on a split of the income that the services are generating. The revenue sharing models are the main reason for so much other premium SMS content being offered today.

Although there is not one "killer application" that stands out today, our new report goes through the content areas that will be biggest in 2005, where 5 areas stand out as the big money making services.

They will boost the value of the market for premium mobile services to a staggering Euro 23 billion - thereby bringing the European non-voice average revenue pr. user (ARPU) - including person to person messaging - in 2005 to 32%, up from 14% in 2002. The more advanced markets will have the highest ARPU - with Norway again among the leaders, as they were when they first proved that there was a market for premium SMS services at the turn of the century.