Instant Messaging will overtake email within a year, says Juniper Research

New data from Juniper Research has shown that mobile and online messaging traffic will reach 160 trillion per annum by 2019, up from 94.2 trillion this year – equating to approximately 438 billion messages sent and received by users on a daily basis by 2019. These figures incorporate SMS, MMS, IM (Instant Messaging), Social Media and Email.

Last year, email accounted for the largest share of traffic, at around 35 trillion messages per year – although almost 80% of this figure (28 trillion) can be categorized as spam. However, within the next 12 months IM will overtake email generating almost 43 trillion messages annually.

The research – Mobile & Online Messaging: SMS, RCS & IM Markets 2015-2019 – observed that the negligible cost of IM services had led to significant migration from SMS. It noted that service providers such as Tencent’s QQ, WhatsApp and WeChat now had more than 400 million active users, with WhatsApp reporting in excess of 30bn messages sent per day.

Meanwhile, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are continuing to experience sharp uplifts in usage, with Facebook alone now seeing more than 5.8bn posts, likes and comments per day.

Meanwhile, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are continuing to experience sharp uplifts in usage, with Facebook alone now seeing more than 5.8bn posts, likes and comments per day.

Application-to-Person (A2P) Messaging Drives Revenues

However, the research found that enterprises continued to regard A2P SMS as more reliable and secure than IM for services such as verification and notification, driving A2P revenues to more than $70bn by 2019, up from $62.8bn this year.

Many OTT messaging players are in the process of diversifying their offerings across markets as diverse as food ordering, taxi bookings and payments. Examples would include Snapchat with their ‘Snapcash’ service, and LINE’s LINE Pay.

MNOs have been slow to implement RCS (Rich Communications Services), which will enable the provision of enhanced messaging services, although the recent availability of joyn-enabled smartphones allied to greater commercial deployments should significantly boost traffic in the medium term.