Juniper Research has predicted that demand for Web 2.0 services on mobile phones and the associated annual revenues from those services will reach $18.9 billion by 2014.
Web 2.0, according to Juniper, includes common Web applications that individuals use to generate, consume and interact with digital content. It covers the social Web and other sites that prompt user interaction.
The growing involvement of users with the social Web has a substantial effect on the business models, development strategies and revenues of mobile service providers, equipment manufacturers and other players in the mobile industry.
Mobile Web 2.0 is somewhat different from traditional Web 2.0 due to the technical and physical constraints of mobiles, such as their relative inability to work with Flash and AJAX. As a result, Mobile Web 2.0 substantially lags behind the full-fledged Web 2.0 as far as its technological evolution is concerned.
The development of smartphones and the iPhone and the availability of various services on mobile – SMS, MMS, IM and VoIP – give mobile social media advantages, such as the immediacy of content sharing, which has helped the medium gain a lot of ground in the second half of 2009, and it continues to do so in 2010.
Services such as mobile messaging and mobile Internet browsing are growing rapidly. While such rapid growth raises concerns, it also leads mobile industry experts to believe that mobile social media can be monetised by means of contextual and location targeted advertising in conjunction with premium services and virtual goods.
In fact, Juniper’s studies have also found that mobile Web users are more willing to pay for services provided to them than desktop users are.
Currently, Web 2.0 on mobile is valued at $5 billion by Juniper Research. This value is estimated to go up almost 4 times by 2014.
