UPDATE: Informa has issued a press release on these figures, pinpointing it at $13.1 billion from mobile communities and user generated content. From the release: “Chat services currently represent the largest segment of the market, driven by the fact that they are handset agnostic and can be conducted over the most popular form of mobile data, SMS. However, as increasing numbers of photo and video enabled devices enter the market, the volume of users uploading images or clips is expected to grow significantly. In 2006, 46 million users are expected to submit video clips to services such as SeeMeTV or YouTube from their mobile phone, rising to 198 million by 2011.”

Tomi T. Ahonen has argued that mobile social networking is the killer app for 3G (there’s a phrase I haven’t heard in a while) comparing it to the startlingly successful SMS. He picks up on a figure from Informa that I The Mobilization Of Home Video without picking up on its significance: “operator revenue from such services will rise to more than $13 billion by 2011 from $3.45 billion this year”. That is a huge figure…To compare:
—Juniper put mobile games for 2006 at $3 billion.
—Infonetics predicts that “mobile video services around the world is set to skyrocket from $46.2 million in 2005 to $5.6 billion in 2009”.
It’s always tricky comparing figures from different analysts, because they tend to measure slightly different things in slightly different ways. But this indicates that the mobile social community market is now a huge market in its own right, as big as the recognised gorillas of music, games and video.