A new research report by Berg Insight predicts that revenue from mobile location-based services in Europe will grow from €735 million last year to €2.3 billion (£1.9 billion) in 2018, which is a compound annual growth rate of 25.8%.
Meanwhile, the North American mobile location-based service market is expected to grow at 16.1% per year from $1.8 billion in 2013 to reach $3.8 billion (£2.3 billion) in 2018.
The main growth will come from advertising revenue in the social networking and local search segments. It’s estimated that half of all mobile subscribers in Europe were frequent users of at least one location-based service at the end of 2013, while figures in North America are even higher.
In fact, the social networking and entertainment category has now become the largest location-based service segment both in terms of number of active users and revenues.
André Malm, Senior Analyst at Berg Insight, said “Advertising is the main source of revenues for most consumer oriented LBS. Revenues are however far from evenly distributed as major players including Facebook and Google with broad audiences have attracted the majority of ad spend”.
[Report brochure: Mobile Location-Based Services (pdf)]