Mobile and online messaging traffic will reach 160 trillion messages per annum by 2019, up from 94.2 trillion this year. This equates to approximately 438 billion messages sent and received by users on a daily basis by 2019.
These global figures incorporate SMS, multimedia messaging service, instant messaging (IM), social media and e-mail.
This is according to a recent report by Juniper Research - Sending Out An SMS - which focuses on the latest developments in the mobile ecosystem.
The report notes last year, e-mail accounted for the largest share of traffic, at around 35 trillion messages per year - although almost 80% of this figure (28 trillion) can be categorised as spam.
Within the next 12 months, IM will overtake e-mail, generating almost 43 trillion messages annually, says Juniper Research.
However, the research discovered enterprises continue to regard application-to-person (A2P) SMS as more reliable and secure than IM for services such as verification and notification. This will drive A2P revenue to more than $70 billion by 2019, up from $62.8 billion this year.
Steffen Sorrell, senior analyst at Juniper Research, says A2P will prove popular in the next few years, as financial institutions and other services require a secure way to send notifications and verification messages.
While SMS revenue as a whole will see a decline, A2P SMS will go against this trend and see an increase in returns, says Juniper Research.
"With the large growth in the A2P SMS space, an over the top (OTT) form of A2P which offers secure message delivery could prove to be a money-spinner," Sorell says.
He points out IM will continue to prove popular with consumers, although OTT providers need to find monetisation solutions. "They have huge figures in terms of traffic, but comparatively low figures in terms of revenue."
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