Without much doubt, mobile messaging cannibalizes some amount of mobile end user use of voice services, text messaging or email. The issue is how much, and which services are benefiting from the changing behavior.
Itr is hard to prove a negative, in other words, how much slower mobile text messaging revenue has grown because people use social messaging on their mobile devices.
Some, such as Portio Research, do not think mobile service providers actually have lost much revenue, so far, to social and mobile alternatives. That does not mean it is not happening, or will not happen in the future, only that revenue growth, though perhaps slowed, has not gone into reverse, yet.
That might provide scant comfort, as even Portion predicts revenue will start to decline, globally, in 2014.
Also, in some markets, all the mobile communication methods are used frequently. But network effects still are an inhibitor to wider use of various social messaging apps.
That's the problem with social mesaging: one cannot always be sure a message recipient is on the same network, a fact that continues to weigh in favor of text messaging, which has ubiquity in the mobile domain.
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