The commercial networks might claim the free to air Aussie Nielsen figures, but online? It’s as easy as…
I’ll freely admit that I’m a big fan of the ABC, and it by far takes the lion’s share of my admittedly limited free to air watching time. Online, though is another story, as there’s many sources of information out there. According to a release from the ABC’s mobile division, though, I may soon be in a minority, as the division’s mobile records are being broken left, right and centre.
Amongst the ABC’s self-touted highlights, the ABC’s iPhone app has been downloaded one million times in the seventeen months. The mercantile side of my brain that wishes the ABC had more money wonders what would have happened if they’d charged the minimum $1.19 for it, but I suspect the answer would have been complaints about the ABC charging at all. The comparable Android app has only seen a comparatively meagre 10,000 downloads in the same time frame.
Clearly election fever drives app purchasing, as the ABC’s short lived Australia Votes App, available for iPhone, Symbian/Java, Android and Blackberry managed a very respectable 50,000 downloads in a short time frame. While we may not know who’s going to form government for days or weeks yet, we were clearly very keen on election news on election day. At 4pm on August the 21st, the Australia Votes app for iPhone was in such demand that the number of downloads per second placed it number seven worldwide on the iTunes Top Movers chart at 4pm on August 21st.
Switching out of election mode, the triple j Unearthed app lags behind slightly with 200,000 downloads, but it’s only been available for seven months and is clearly more niche-audience oriented. The two and a half months that the iPad version of the ABC’s app has been available has seen one hundred thousand downloads take place.
If Apps aren’t your style, the release also notes that the ABC’s mobile portal grew in traffic 105% year on year.
This begs the question — how do you access the ABC?