Publishers starting to name-check iTunes ‘Top Grossing Apps’ list like Amazon’s ‘Bestsellers’

At a panel during the TechCrunch conference in New York earlier this week, Greg Clayman, publisher of News Corp.'s Daily iPad publication, said the application had "almost a million downloads" since its launch in February.

"This puts us in the large pantheon of large apps," Clayman said. "We are consistently now in the 'Top Grossing Apps,' in the top 10 or 12. Today we're number three."

Clayman added: "Tomorrow, somebody will spend a lot of money on Smurfs, you know, and we'll be number four."

His remarks echoed similar comments made by New Yorker editor David Remnick at the National Magazine Awards earlier this month.

"There are many ways to have a good day in the magazine business," Remnick said. "Ours is to see our app passing 'Angry Birds' on iTunes."

Jokes aside, this is how some magazine and newspaper publishers, at least publicly, are measuring the early success of their flashy iPad editions.

Clayman, who began charging for downloads of his app in March, said that among "news" apps, the Daily is number two behind Wired, which began offering subscriptions this week.

Given some of the recent name-checks, it sounds like some publishers are looking at the list like Amazon's Bestseller list. And just like that list, the iTunes' chart offers no hard numbers.

While landing on the "Top Grossing" list may inspire some App store browsers to take a chance on a paid download--which is important, given the reported $30 million News Corp. paid to launch The Daily--it's is not likely to impress advertisers.

"The 'Top Grossing' list is a great indicator of some things, but it's no kind of metric for marketer," Nat Ives, media editor of Advertising Age, told The Cutline. "Advertisers choose the media they buy based partly on the number of people they'll reach, but saying one app grossed more others doesn't help them figure that out."

And advertisers consider iPad editions to be in the nascent stage.

"For the moment a lot of advertisers still seem okay to consider their advertising in publishers' iPad apps fairly experimental, a good way to learn how the platform works, what it's good for, what it can do so far and what it can't," Ives added. "It also gets them in front of a theoretically pretty desirable crowd -- iPad owners. But media buyers are grumbling more about paying much for any app that's not going to give them real numbers on how many people use it, how often, how long and all the measurements that digital media was supposed to have."

"Despite the buzz, advertisers really want to see a lot more before they commit," Matt Kinsman, executive editor of Folio magazine, added. "They want usage metrics, they want to know who is buying the apps and how they're using them."

(Photo illustration by The Cutline)