News24’s iPhone app launched about a month ago, and the uptake has been pretty good as of late. Although the uptake decreases with time, it’s amazing how much time is spent within the application. I’m going to show you a snippet of info pertaining to the last 3 weeks of usage.

I find it astonishing that 6250 uniques over a period of 3 weeks are able to spend 1 year and 105 days within the application. That’s an average of 1.7 hours per visitor in 2 weeks. Woah… That’s not so bad.

iPhone users are heavy internet users and this proves it. Although they are a small % of the market make up, they are the ones who are consuming the most.

Compare this to our m.24.com WAP offering, where the average time spent per visit is in the region of 3-4 minutes! Obviously, the WAP offering appeals to a wider audience, of which a large part would fall under the lower LSM categories. M.24.com’s properties are generating in the reagion of 100-110k unique visitors a month with approximately 1.3 million page impressions. A lot more than the iPhone app.

This leaves the question, who are advertisers after? How efficient is it to purchase advertising based purely on stats (Obviously it depends on the product / service being advertised). I think this confirms my solid belief in advertising by way of branded mobile applications as opposed to slapping a banner on a WAP site purely because of it’s numbers.

What do you think?

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