Rusbridger: ‘iPad Could Produce Significant Revenue Streams’

It’s not exactly a great leap from publishing an iPhone app to offering one on the soon-to-be-released iPad – not only will the former run on the latter; the skillset for developing the latter won’t be significantly different.

So publishers who have already found a degree of incremental revenue from iPhone are now looking for another increment from its bigger brother…

Guardian editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger, whose newspaper shifted 70,000 downloads of its £2.39 iPhone app in its first month despite the company opposing web paywalls in principle, tells Reuters

“That’s not a transformative thing, but it is a signal that people are prepared to pay on mobile. It’s perfectly possible that the iPad, if we get the right functionality and design, could produce interesting, significant revenue streams.”

If we can make people pay on mobile, then we should – what I’m against is a universal paywall that puts all your content behind.”

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