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BREAKING NEWS & VIEWS

Style.com on iPhone: 1 Million Ads & Counting
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Steve Smith

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Steve Jobs and assorted App Store developers have been throwing around a lot of big numbers to describe the popularity of the game-changing third-party applications on iPhone and iPod Touch devices. Many in the mobile industry insist that the iPhone 3G launch on July 11 was less important than the concurrent App Store unveiling. For the first time, mobile phone users could easily download hundreds of tools directly to their phone, circumventing their carriers, usurious subscriber fees, and dismal storefront interfaces. A user base of less than 10 million apparently downloaded over 100 million applications in the first couple of months, and some game titles like Super Monkey Ball from Sega topped 250,000 in sales (at $9.95 a pop).

But with more than three thousand applications in the store now, how do individual media brands fare? The question any publisher must ask herself is whether this platform really can scale effectively for an individual title. CondeNet’s Style.com is among the first to give some indication. The company announced yesterday that the Style.com app is running on 70,000 devices and is being downloaded at a rate of 3,000 a day. A lot of iPhone/Touch users download apps as tests, so it is the steady usage rates that really matter. On any given day a more modest 9,000 people actively use the app. But altogether, CondeNet claims that 1.1 million ads have been served into the device. A full-page ad runs as an interstitial when the user accesses the latest news from the fashion runways. That being the case, the actual page view count from this app much be multiples higher than the ads served.

Overall, the Style.com numbers are interesting but work on a different scale from some other high profile news and entertainment apps. APNews recently announced that it served over 16 million page views in a month. Applications like WeatherBug and Pandora have seen well over 1 million downloads of their apps. At a recent conference during New York Ad Week, an executive from Web radio provider Pandora compared the performance of the iPhone application to other Pandroa downloadables available from the major carriers on their handsets. Apparently, the level of downloading and subsequent activity from the iPhone simply blow away any other handset, Pandora says. Having a content brand as a top level icon on the home page of a handset makes all the difference, they seem to think. Which may explain why Google Android, T-Mobile, and now even Microsoft Windows Mobile are planning similar, user-friendly, app stores.

If you have any breaking news please contact Amy Novak at anovak@accessintel.com

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