The Times’ iPad edition, which went on sale along with the tablet’s UK debut Friday morning, sold 5,000 copies in three days, News Corp.’s CEO Rupert Murdoch told AllThingsD’s D8 conference Tuesday, at which he also spoke about the true value of content (see our full post).
At the app price of £9.99, that’s £49,950 income in just a few days, before Apple’s commission. Not bad for a few days’ work, and could be a relatively nice earner…
But whether significant numbers of iPad users will renew the £9.99 subscription each month, after that first-week flurry of app excitement, remains to be seen.
WSJ
Also at D8, Murdoch said his Wall Street Journal app now has 10,000 customers, paying $17.29 a month or free to those already subscribed to the website/newspaper.
Photo by byrion on Flickr. Some rights reserved
FT
Yesterday, Financial Times product development manager Steven Pinches told a separate conference the FT has seen 130,000 downloads of its free-to-download iPad app since it was made available to the device in the U.S. two weeks back (via Mobile Entertainment).
What we don’t know – whether the app is actually enticing iPad users to subscribe to the FT for the first time.
Unlike the Times, the FT’s app is free for two months thanks to a sponsorship deal, but will then offer access only to readers who pay the title’s platform-agnostic annual subscription.
The Australian
The $4.99-a-month iPad app for News Corp’s The Australian, also launched Friday morning, saw 4,500 downloads, Murdoch said
The Guardian
The Guardian Eyewitness photography app, from our parent company Guardian News & Media, has seen 90,000 downloads since iPad’s US launch, free under a Canon sponsorship. No sign of a news app for now.
Notes
In theory, The Times’ iPad popularity could be tempered because, unlike either FT or WSJ, subscribers to the website or paper must pay again to read the iPad version, which News Corp (NYSE: NWS) is touting as an entirely separate product.