News applications fastest growing on the iPhone

Media blog Monday Note alerted me to this chart from O’Reilly Media, showing the growth in applications for the iPhone for the week ending 12 July.

Though games is the largest category, prompting Nintendo to blame Apple for a slide in sales, the fastest growing area is news, with the number of apps increasing 253.6% compared to the previous 12 weeks.

From personal experience that rings true, an online news stand being the thing that I personally use my iPhone the most for, having downloaded the New York Times, Huffington Post, The Independent, The Telegraph and MeeHive onto my phone.

It’s something I’ve talked about previously, but the iPhone has for the first time, made reading a newspaper on the phone a reasonably pleasurable experience. By comparison, three years ago we took on a client called Mobizines, which committed to delivering online magazines onto your phone…it used old style WAP and so the uptake was less than spectacular.

Will people pay for mobile news?

Looking at this growth rate, Monday Note’s Federic Filloux (whose day job involves being an editor for Norwegian media group Schibsted) then poses the question, is mobile news not the way to go when it comes to publishers wanting to charge for content?

This is especially since AppPurchase on the latest version of the iPhone software allows you to buy things from within an application (ie without having to go to the browser), which means publishers could set up a quarterly subscription system within their apps.

Frederic produces a model that shows that a very modest 20 euros (US $28 /£17 /AUS $34) per reader per year based on 600k downloads, could raise a significant amount of cash that would plug a lot of budget holes.

It’s a really interesting model, one that I personally would be willing to pay a small quarterly fee for (certainly for the New York Times)

That’s for the simple reason that on the iPhone I feel as if I am getting something I don’t get online where news is more of a commodity, and most people now bypass newspaper websites anyway.

Or – rather than charge for content, AppPurchase could be used to cross-sell services on the back of content, something the UK’s Daily Telegraph does very successfully with its Web edition. I wonder if that Ayatollah of the old order, Rupert Murdoch, is listening?