When was the last time you sent a camera phone photo wirelessly? If you have done this at all, you are probably doing it a lot less than you used to.
I came across this amazing data yesterday:
In spite of what you might be thinking now, this information is not off-topic.
When camera phones were first introduced, carriers salivated at the thought of all the data charges users would incur by zapping photos back and forth. The data shows that at the dawn of camera phones, users took advantage of the novelty of instant picture sharing.
That novelty is wearing off and the data charges are vanishing with it. I don’t think people use their camera phones any less, its just that they are saving the pictures on their computers and the carriers aren’t seeing any revenue from camera phone use.
I think camera phones are a perfect parallel to music phones. We are at the dawn of cellular phones with MP3 players:
What are the carriers doing? They are salivating at the thought of all the data charges users will incur by downloading music OTA. Sound familiar?
Here is what is going to happen – actually it already is. People will download music OTA while it is a novelty then they will sideload all their MP3s to their music phone (sideloading is primary way to get music on a music phone). Just like people expect a camera on their phone they will expect an MP3 player, but the carrier will not see any revenue from the use of this feature.
OK, listen up carriers – here is how you avoid this from happening: create a world where cellphone music = free music. All MP3s on a cellular phone should be free to the consumer through ad-support. I have blogged before about how the cellphone is the perfect ad-supported music device.
Carriers can make a lot of money from music phones if they focus on TSL instead of data charges.
2 comments:
This is an excellent article. Great parallel between visual data/audio data... if I ran a mobile telco I'd probably be inclined to headhunt ya :)
This actually is a blatant misuse of "statistics" to try to support a point that is actually false. Over these same years the number of camera phones grew in the US so dramatically that even with the declining percentages, the actual number of people sending photos rose significantly - here is my estimate with some supporting data:
Here’s some other data:
M:Metrics says that the number of cameraphone owners has climbed to 106 million in the United States, crossing the 50% threshold (51% in Feb 2007 – so we’ll call that 2006)
The Yankee Group says 53 million camera phones were sold in the U.S. in 2005 compared to 22 million in 2004.
About 30 million U.S. camera-phone owners took photos with their camera phones as of October 2005, compared with 16.7 million in November 2004, M:Metrics estimated."
So, if you overlay the percentages with some of this data for the last three years (using the data that about 80% of camera phone owners take pictures with them.)
2006 – 24% of 106M = 25M people sent photos
2005 – 28% of 40 M = 11M people sent photos
2004 – 36% of 21M = 8M sent photos
I’d say that is pretty much exactly opposite of the point the author wanted to make.
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