This Friday, July 19, marks one year since the launch of Singapore’s first–and still only–fully interactive lifestyle magazine app: the I-S Tablet App. (Read more about why you should download it here!)
In that time (drum roll, please), we’ve:
- Won the Asian Publishing Award 2012 for Best Publishing App
- Been approached by Apple to be one of their featured apps in the SG app store; in conjunction with a “Read it Here First” campaign in our magazines and the App Store (app users get the magazine a full day before it appears in print).
- Partnered with MINI, Sony TV, Chope, Pan Pacific and more (thanks guys!) to offer the only truly interactive ads in town: including 360-degree visuals, embedded TV show trailers, hotlinking and direct table booking.
- Published 26 issues of the magazine app, plus app-exclusive editions of 5 guides: Top Tables (dining), Travel, Singapore F1, After Hours (nightlife) and Lunch.
- Branched out from iPad with the launch of an Android edition
- Made a YouTube video (you’ll be able to catch a version of this on the big screen at the upcoming Films at the Fort outdoor movie festival).
- Launched sister editions in Bangkok and Hong Kong
- Campaigned against “crap apps”: repackaged PDFs, “free” apps you actually have to pay for, and other lame attempts to unfairly part readers from their money. The I-S app is designed from the ground up, truly interactive, free to download and every single issue in it is free.
- Travelled to Vietnam to train Ringier Publishing in building magazine apps of their own.
We’ve continued to tweak and improve the app with every issue, and have some exciting app-related plans for the coming year. In the meantime, we thought it’d be fun to share some of our usage stats for the tech nerds among you. In fact, given how scarce usage stats are for the digital publishing industry at large, we figured disclosing some of our own numbers might be a good thing for everyone. So here we go:
- We’ve accumulated almost 7,500 unique users in one year (that’s after you discount people who’ve upgraded each time we’ve put out a new version; which, inexplicably, some analytics providers don’t do). We’d hoped for 10,000, but hey we still have a couple of days to go…
- Between them, users have activated the app more than 130,000 times. That means, on average (and with a little creative math), each user downloads two out of every three issues.
- The vast majority (95%+) of those users are on iPad. Whether that’s because there aren’t as many Android users here, our Android marketing hasn’t been as strong, or some other mysterious cause, we’re not sure. Recently, Sony kindly lent us a bunch of Android tablets to play with, so we hope to make real headway on this shortly.
- Interestingly, 14% of users already access the app via the iPad Mini. That’s despite the device only having been available since November. (The biggest individual device usage comes from the 3rd gen iPad at 33%.)
- The highest traffic is at the end of the day: 15% of all usage comes between 10pm and midnight Singapore time. (5am-6am is the slowest hour.)
- The average session length (i.e. how long the user spends engaging each time they activate the app) is 8.3 minutes. That’s pretty darn good, even compared with print.
- The most popular edition to date, with as-near-as 4000 unique downloads, was this year’s Top Tables dining guide, which came out in March. (That may say more about Singaporean obsessions than our app, though.) The most popular regular issue (i.e. not a guide) was April’s “Battle of the flea markets”, which has now been downloaded almost 3,500 times. (Of course, all the old issues are still up there, so numbers continue to grow over time.)
- Tied in last place for usage, with only one session originating from each of them in the last 12 months, are Colombia, Dijibouti, Guatemala, Guernsey and… Afghanistan. We guess when you’re under fire in Helmand there’s nothing quite as comforting as reading about new cupcake stores in Tiong Bahru. (Naturally, the overwhelming majority of usage comes from Singapore; though it can be hard working out whether certain users are based overseas or simply using an overseas app store from here.)
