10 Percent Ad, Video Revenues?

Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin says social networking, mobile advertising, mobile video, and other advanced applications will generate "10 percent of our revenue within three or four years." Some might consider that target an aggressive posture for a company that today generates $60 billion in annual revenues. $6 billion annually from advertising and video? But Vodafone already gets in excess of 20 percent of total revenues from data services of one sort or another. By some measures, U.S. wireless operators now get just a bit over 10 percent of total revenues from data services.

During the first half of 2006, wireless data revenues have been on the rise in North America, Asian and Europe. Japan led the way with approximately $10 billion in wireless data service revenues for the first half of 2006. The U.S. market and China followed with approximately $7 billon and $5.5 billion in data revenues.

The most successful carrier worldwide in terms of total wireless data revenue for the first six months of 2006 was NTT DoCoMo with over $5.1B in data revenues.