iLounge

By Charles Starrett

Senior Editor, iLounge
Published: Thursday, May 12, 2011
News Category: Mix

Apple has launched its 100th iAd campaign, according to The Loop. The report states that the 100th campaign, from real estate firm Coldwell Banker, began in late March and has performed well thus far, garnering tap rates five times higher than a normal online banner and an average of 11 pages viewed per visit. As noted in the report, iAd is now live in seven countries; Apple recently lowered the initial buy-in for iAds from $1 million to $500,000, allowing companies with smaller budgets to join the program.

Citing new data from Context, Cult of Mac reports that the 64GB iPad 2 with 3G is the most popular iPad 2 model in Western Europe. According to the report, the higest-end iPad 2 represented 33 percent of all sales tracked; when combined with sales of the 16GB Wi-Fi only iPad 2 —the least expensive model available—they accounted for more than half of all iPad 2 sales in the region.

Sales of digital music helped drive overall U.S. music sales up 1.6 percent thus far in 2011, according to new data from the Nielsen Company. Through May 8, digital album and track purchases were up 16.8 percent and 9.6 percent, respectively, year-over-year, as digital retailers received more than half of all music transactions. Catalog album sales are also up 5.4 percent in 2011, in part due to The Beatles’ catalog being available on iTunes; interestingly, vinyl sales are up 37 percent year-over-year, despite accounting for just 1.2 percent of all physical sales.

BeamItDown Software has announced that it will no longer be supporting its iOS eBook reading solution iFlowReader and will be shutting down on May 31. According to a lengthy post on the iFlowReader website, the company explains that “Apple has made it completely impossible for anyone but Apple to make a profit selling contemporary ebooks on any iOS device. We cannot survive selling books at a loss and so we are forced to go out of business. We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us by changing the rules in the middle of the game.”