MobileWebsiteWatch

In another of their many informative and wide based market studies, Juniper Research released a paper yesterday that declares that ad-funded social networks will provide the bulk of the revenue in the mobile user generated content space, and that that number is likely to be as large as $7,300,000,000 in only 5 years.According to report author Dr Windsor Holden,

“It’s clear that we have seen an industry wide shift regarding the implementation of business models in this area. Whereas initially there was a perception that users would pay a small mobility premium to access social networks on their handsets, it rapidly became clear that to achieve truly mass adoption, it would be necessary to offer free membership and then to augment that with advertising and the sale of premium content.”

This release was well times with the news from Reuters this week a that social networking has toppled porn, the longstanding champ, as the most visited sites on the internet.  The fact that more and more people expect to be able to access social networking services on their phones should be a loud and clear call that mobile web content and functionality is in high demand.  The availability of mobile optimized content on sites of all types is increasingly the users expectation.

The ads on social networking sites can be very targeted, and they will have little value if they don’t point the mobile user to an optimized Web site that can fully engage them and actually sell them, not just some little tent of a WAP site that is not up to date or dynamic.

Below is the graph of the expected growth of the market. (Note: PCD = Personal Content Delivery)