According to Juniper Research, instant messaging (IM) will overtake email within the next 12 months generating about 43 trillion messages annually.

With about 35 trillion messages, email accounted for the largest share of traffic in 2014. Out of this, about 80 per cent or 28 trillion of data can be categorised as spam. The research firm underlines that mobile and online messaging traffic comprising of SMS, MMS, instant messaging, social media and email is expected to grow from 94.2 trillion in 2014 to 160 trillion per annum by 2019.

Juniper Research underlines that the negligible cost of IM services is leading to significant migration from SMS. Tencent QQ, WhatsApp and WeChat have more than 400 million active users, with WhatsApp supporting more than 30 billion messages per day. Meanwhile, social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are also witnessing increase in usage. Facebook reports more than 5.8 billion posts, likes and comments per day.

The research firm concludes that since application-to-person (A2P) SMS are more reliable and secure than IM for services such as verification and notification, A2P revenues are expected to grow from $62.8 billion in 2014 to 70 billion by 2019.