A new report published by Juniper Research forecasts that the number of mobile IM (Instant Messaging) users will exceed 1.3 billion by 2016. This tripling of users from last year will be driven by the arrival of new services, such as Apple’s iMessage, and continued growth of existing services, such as AOL’s AIM, Blackberry Messenger, Microsoft’s Windows Live, Skype and Yahoo! Messenger.
The launch of these free Mobile IM services has been facilitated by the increasing number of smartphones in use, low-cost data packages and the development of high speed mobile networks. While some IM services are ad-funded, most are viewed by the operators as customer retention tools, with the only cost to the user being the data usage charged. However, the report finds that, while users of these services will grow, they will not challenge SMS as the primary means of text communication on mobile handsets.
