The Australian mobile content market has seen significant increases in carrier portal services over 2006 and 2007, but are still far below the premium SMS (PSMS) market. The PSMS market showed growth, climbing towards AU$200 million (US$158.5 million) according to telecoms analyst Paul Budde, but he expects it to remain static in the future, partly due to Vodafone prepaid caps restricting access to PSMS. In Australia almost half of the PSMS market is still text based, such as horoscopes. In the rest of the PSMS market the usual suspects dominate, ringtones and screensavers, chat/dating services and voting competitions. Full track music services and video services are expected to grow. (release)

The operators are not getting much revenue from content either, apparently, with only 5 percent of mobile operator revenue generated by services other than voice or SMS, reports Budde (here). Interestingly, straightforward mobile data traffic has increased significantly and operators are making far more money from the traffic than from content...do I detect changing business models?