Where did this come from, 100 billion dollar new industry - mobile data

The mobile internet is a 100 billion dollar industry already.

Its common to consider the internet enabled industries to be the big growth engines. We marvel at the search industry powered by the internet and spawning global giant Google. We admire the rapid growth of digital community sites like MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. We report on the cannibalization of industries and observe the shifts in users, revenues, profits from the old to the new.

Now the mobile internet has reached a milestone. Informa, the research organization reports that for 2005 the final revenue numbers for the mobile services industry were 102 billion dollars. First, obviously, these numbers totally dwarf many industries we follow here at this site such as Hollywood box office (20 billion). The music industry is about a 30 billion dollar industry. The videogaming software industry is about 20 billion and its hardware sales (sales of PlayStations, Xboxes etc) is another 20 billion.

The mobile services industry is bigger than all three of these combined.  Or to put it in another way, the mobile services industry is about as big as the total national GDP of countries like Singapore, Czech Republic, Venezuela, Hungary or Egypt.

A hundred billion dollars annually. Came from nowhere in 1992. Still today, three out of every four dollars is from SMS text messaging - but bear in mind the earlier posting we had here, that you can become a global mogul and millionaire even with the "primitive" digital service called SMS text messaging. More interestingly that newer part, about a quarter of the total revenues from "value-add services" includes everything from selling ringing tones and mobile games, to web and WAP browsing, to mobile advertising, to music and TV streaming, and a vast array of totally new services not even possible on previous technologies - like voting for reality TV shows like Big Brother, Pop Idol and Survivor Island etc.

Launched in 1992, in only thirteen years already a billion dollars and growing strong. Informa also says the first quarter is again up, at 28 billion dollars (on pace for 110 billion dollars for this year, or more)

Its a good business to be in, a growth business.