With 112.6 million mobile subscribers, carrier billing is the number one digital content payment method with the widest potential reach in Germany. While mobile handset penetration is 139.2%, with many people having two mobile devices, only 35% of the population owns a credit card.
So finds the latest DIMOCO Carrier Billing market special, produced in cooperation with Juniper Research and Price Waterhouse Coopers. The study also finds that the digital content market in Germany will increase to €4.623 billion revenue in 2018.
Leading the way is the e-book, e-magazine and e-newspaper market, likely to account for €1.684 billion of the total by 2018. E-games comes second at €1.569 billion in 2018. Home videos will hit €761 million and digital music €609 million.
“Digital content is being increasingly consumed on mobile devices, as the number of smartphones in Germany has gone up by 20% in just the last 2 years,” says Gerald Tauchner, DIMOCO Co-Founder and CEO, comparing figures from DIMOCOs’ Germany Carrier Billing market specials 2014 and 2015.
The German mobile network market is operated by Telekom Germany (35% market share), Vodafone (28% market share) and Telefónica Germany (37% market share including the brands O2 and e-plus).
Integrating Carrier Billing into the checkout process lets digital content providers as well as consumers benefit from a number of aspects, says DIMOCO. While consumers prefer Carrier Billing if the payment method is available, and are more likely to purchase digital content due to its simplicity, convenience and security, companies profit from higher conversion rates and a billing method available on multiple screens.
Conversion rates go up to 70% for first time transactions (credit card billing: only 10 %) and up to 80-88% at repeat digital content purchases (credit card billing: only 20 %) were measured in Europe.
On the German market, available via DIMOCO, services, transitional goods and digital content on all digital channels can be monetized as one-off or subscription service transactions within a price range of €0.19 and €30, depending on the mobile network operator. The entire digital content market in Europe is expected to be worth €37 billion in 2018, approximately €7.2 billion of that amount will be billed via Carrier Billing in Europe.
