iPhone apps now more popular than major TV shows and sports broadcasts
Is iPhone the next American Idol? — The daily audience for apps that run on Apple's iOS operating system (for the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad) has now surpassed 19 million users, who spend an average of 22 minutes per …
Context & Ripple Effects
This story lands at the end of a two-year argument about what the App Store actually was. When the New York Times asked in August 2009 whether there was 'an app for that — but a revenue stream?', apps were a novelty catalog; by March 2010 GigaOM could measure the catalog maturing into a library, with books now outnumbering games on the iPhone. What VentureBeat adds on October 11, 2010 is the audience dimension: 19 million daily users averaging 22 minutes each is a scale figure, the kind broadcasters use.
That reframes the earlier coverage. The monetization question posed in the Times' 2009 piece was asked when apps were too small to matter to media buyers; an audience larger than major TV shows and sports broadcasts makes apps legible as a media channel, with Apple — riding confirmed momentum like the end of the Antennagate scandal and its $1 billion North Carolina data center build-out — positioned as the gatekeeper of that attention.
First-order effects
- Apple gains a new pitch to advertisers and media partners: iOS now delivers a measurable daily audience on par with prime-time television, turning the App Store from a storefront into a ratings-worthy medium.
- App developers holding top-20 audiences become direct competitors to TV networks for the same 22-minute attention blocks, changing who counts as a 'network' in advertising negotiations.
Second-order effects
- Broadcasters and cable networks face pressure to respond in kind — building their own app presences on iOS rather than treating it as a promotional annex — because the audience comparison is now being made in public.
- The scale figures sharpen the monetization question from 2009: with audiences this large, developer business models (paid downloads versus sustained engagement) determine whether Apple's platform captures the value or merely hosts it.
Third-order effects
- If app audiences keep compounding while TV audiences fragment, attention measurement itself shifts from broadcast ratings toward platform-reported usage — concentrating pricing power with whoever owns the distribution layer, which in 2010 means Apple.
- The pattern points toward apps being treated as media properties in their own right — commissioned, measured, and bought like shows — a redefinition of 'channel' that regulators and media conglomerates have not yet built structures for.
The trend: Mobile app platforms are crossing from software distribution into mass-audience media, with platform owners like Apple controlling both the audience and the measurement of it.