Speaking at a seminar on the future of the web, Tim Berners-Lee said there is a massive market for mobile content but that designers are limiting the industry’s profit potential by designing pages that don’t translate well onto handsets.
“Everyone was supposed to be browsing the web with their mobile phone, but the problem is that it has not happened,” Berners-Lee said. “It is a chicken-or-egg thing. You have to get people to understand the potential returns.”
Despite Berners-Lee’s somewhat pessimistic view, research firm Strategy Analytics this week released a report predicting that global spending on adult mobile content could rise as high as $5 billion by 2010. The firm originally predicted market potential of $1 billion, but boosted its own estimates based on market demand and a spat of new technologies that make mobile phones more porn friendly.
For example, mobile phone makers are implementing more stringent age-verification strategies, and more than 50 percent of all phones sold have bright color screens — a figure expected to rise to more than 80 percent by 2010. Also, Cingular and Verizon this week announced a new service that allows subscribers to swap photo and multimedia emails with subscribers on rival networks.
Still, as Berners-Lee pointed out, all of these new technologies will mean very little in terms of hard dollars if content providers are not focused on taking full advantage of the mobile channel.
“So much about the future of our industry is content,” said Len Lauer, COO of Sprint, who predicts phones will become a “third screen” that is just as much a part of users entertainment environment as computers and TVs.