$2.5 Trillion attributable to Mobile Social Networking?

There's a new forecast for Mobile Social Networking to beat all the previous ones.

iSuppli Corporation, a market research firm, has done a study of Mobile Social Networking and forecasts the impact of this trend in 2020. There's almost no information available on the study except a short article which appears here.

The problem, of course, is in how one defines the market and where one draws the line of impact. In this case, iSuppli seems (in the last paragraph of the article) to include the sales of semiconductors for mobile devices supporting social networking in their forecast.

In the Informa forecast of the Mobile Social Networking market, I did not even include revenues from "bulk" data traffic services generated by Mobile Social Networking. This was because I feel that one cannot directly attribute data plan choices to only one service. It's more likely that people choose their data plans for a bundle of services they think they will need, even though social media and networks may feature very highly in the bundle.

In the forecast, I do include the impact of communications services (such as voice and video calls) initiated from social networking applications and all types of messaging revenues which are linked to those services.

I will be working on the model in the next few weeks and plan to have the 2020 scenario as an exercise during the IIR Mobile Social Networking pre-conference workshop.