The Guardian’s App for the iPhone and iPod Touch was downloaded just under 70,000 times in its first month, with 9,000 downloads in its first two days.
Downloads are priced at £2.39, and have already generated £165k of revenue since launch on 14 December (30 per cent of which goes to Apple).
The app includes news, comment, features, photo galleries, and audio from guardian.co.uk, and allows users to personalise content.
Emily Bell, Director of Digital Content, Guardian News & Media, said:
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“We are thrilled with our download figures for the first month of the app. The feedback we have received from users has been excellent, yet also extremely informative in terms of features and functionality that can be improved in the future. Over the Christmas break the app became available in many areas of mainland Europe, as well as in Canada and Australia for the first time, so we hope our global audiences will enjoy using the app as well.”
The app was designed by an in-house Guardian team and built by 2ergo. Around half of the 927,000 unique users who accessed the Guardian’s mobile site in November were doing so via an iPhone or iPod Touch.
Several publishers are now considering downloadable applications as a means of making money online. Trinity Mirror has announced its intention to launch and charge for 3am.co.uk and MirrorFootball.co.uk website apps in which will be released in early 2010. Daily Mail & General Trust said they are planning to launch 15 iPhone applications in the first half of this year.
The Telegraph’s free iPhone application has been downloaded over 300,000 times and executives claim that it has already returned more than ten times its launch costs via sponsorship deals with Cisco and Dell.
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