Condé Nast has announced some sales figures for its first “issue” application for the iPhone. The $2.99 app for GQ’s December issue has been downloaded 6,641 times since its launch in mid-November, while the January issue app has more than 12,000 downloads.
Quick math: that’s a little less than $20,000 in revenue generated for December, $36,000 for January. Total: $56,000, roughly. (When you take into account Apple’s 30 percent cut, the total is more like $39,000, All Things Digital says.)
Those numbers don’t sound terribly impressive. Nevertheless, Condé Nast is calling the experiment a “success.”
“We threw a great idea at a new medium and it is sticking,” CEO Chuck Townsend said.
To be fair, as Folio points out, those that do download the issue on their iPhones are spending more time with it (83 minutes) than print readers (71 minutes) do.
The mega-publisher said that the price point will stay at $2.99 per issue going forward, but returning customers can download them at $1.99 beginning in March and – key point — subscriptions “are being evaluated.”
Condé Nast added that it is working on developing versions for Apple’s highly-anticipated tablet.
