VeriSign shatters internal mobile messaging records

By Mickey Alam Khan

May 23, 2008

Excited in Textlish

VeriSign Inc. claims that all single-day and quarterly mobile messaging records in its Mobile Messaging Index for the first quarter have been shattered.

The Internet infrastructure provider’s mobile messaging networks are said to have enabled more than 43 billion messages in the first quarter, up more than 34 percent from the fourth quarter and a 154 percent increase from the year-ago period.

“It’s broader acceptance as a means of communication,” said Charles Landry, vice president of global messaging services at VeriSign’s messaging and mobile media division in Mountain View, CA. “In some parts of the global [texting] is cheaper than a voice call.

“Also, what this surge indicates is just the expanding capability of handsets and the number of handsets around the world,” he said. “We continue to see growth in the U.S. and Canada, but we also see tremendous growth outside North America in regions of Asia, Eastern Europe and Central and Latin America.”

VeriSign handled 538 million SMS messages alone on Valentine’s Day – a single-day milestone. The company estimates that nearly 2.12 billion mobile messages were exchanged across all networks, including VeriSign, on that day.

Numbers speak for text
The number of SMS text messages handled by VeriSign’s mobile messaging networks for the first quarter was an estimated 476 million a day, on average. This is an increase from 352 million messages a day in the fourth quarter of 2007 and nearly 189 million messages a day in the first quarter of 2007.

Though SMS is the most popular form of messaging, MMS messages delivering audio, video and images are catching up.

VeriSign handled about 272 million MMS messages in the first quarter, up from 232 million in the fourth quarter of last year and 122 million in the year-ago period.

MMS-related revenue enabled to wireless carriers also more than doubled to $68 million in the first quarter of this year from $31 million in the same quarter last year.

The VeriSign index showed that application-to-person messages including news alerts, ringtones, video clips and related content also jumped to nearly 187 million messages in the first quarter of this year from 155 million in the prior quarter.

Increases in SMS search, messaging campaigns such as “My Grammy Moment” and the growth in the number of mobile banking customers were cited as key reasons for the surge in application-to-person messages. VeriSign said it serves six of the 10 largest banks nationwide.

Not big talk
VeriSign expects that mobile messaging records for revenue and volumes for last year will be overtaken this year.

In fact, VeriSign’s 2007 record of 96 billion mobile messages delivered could be reached this year by the end of the third quarter.

VeriSign had already handled 45 percent as many mobile messages this year through March 31 as it did in the entire 2007.

The company claims it has enabled more than $1.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter for mobile messaging customers worldwide, or one-third of the total for 2007.

“There’s a tremendous opportunity for marketers with the growth in both text and multimedia messaging to target their audiences through the effective management of channels and enterprises that are pushing those messages out,” Mr. Landry said.

“Specifically, we see as an example the convergence of the social networking phenomena with the advanced capabilities of multimedia messaging,” he said. “It provides a great opportunity for those social networks to channel targeted marketing messages to these subscribers.”

When looked at closely, several factors influence the surge in mobile messaging.

First is the increased capability of the mobile handset. In countries such as India and China, the handsets can translate to local languages such as Mandarin or Hindi, for example.

Second, more carriers are offering unlimited bundled plans. The all-you-can-eat voice-and-data mentality is taking root. As a result, there is increased usage of the mobile phone, which quite often is the primary mode of communication in many developing and developed countries.

Finally, there is the reach, or capabilities of other mobile applications.

Take the financial services sector, for example.

Mobile works to the advantage of banks for many reasons including the reduced number of customer queries to call centers, banking on-the-go at all hours and the limited consumer interaction or wait times at ATMs.

“Our recommendations for marketers are to target your audience and to target your channels i.e. which applications you ride on, which sub-segment of subscribers you’re targeting and which use cases provide the greatest opportunity to leverage your message in the mobile marketing space,” Mr. Landry said.

“It’s very gratifying to us to see mobile advertising rapidly become a reality and emerge from the ‘It’ll happen someday’ status that existed for the last two years,” he said.