The value of mobile adult porn is expected to rise by more than 50pc to US$1bn this year, says Juniper Research. With text-based services already established in many countries, the strongest growth will come from more sophisticated services offering video clips and streamed video in addition to text and images.
Juniper claims that the majority of revenues will continue to be derived from Europe and the Asia-Pacific regions, although an increasing availability of services in the US will push North American mobile adult revenues past the US$400m mark by the end of the decade.
The report’s author Dr Windsor Holden said: “At the present time, the size of the US market is extremely limited because customers are used to downloading content through the portal of their network operator and the network operators are reluctant to offer adult content for fear of a regulatory or consumer backlash.
“But in the medium term, customers will become increasingly adept at browsing wireless internet sites operated by aggregators or other independent providers, with the result that overall revenues will show a significant increase,” Holden said.
Holden added that while the market will continue to be dominated by small businesses, the major adult publishers should begin to encroach on their market share from 2005.
“You’re also seeing an increasing level of convergence, with services such as Naked News now available on PDAs and mobile handsets.”
According to Holden’s report, the value of mobile adult content is set to reach US$2.1bn by 2009.
While US networks will continue to eschew adult content, in the UK and mainland Europe the scale of content available directly from the operators is likely to rise dramatically in the short to medium term.
More than half of the net additions to the user base of adult text-based services will come from Asia.
According to Juniper, European customers are currently the biggest spenders on adult content, with an annual average revenue per user of more than US$34.
By John Kennedy
