While perusing the iTunes store today, we noticed that The Daily, Rupert Murdoch’s tablet-only tabloid, is the “Top Grossing” app — raking in more than even Angry Birds HD! The app has been available on a for-pay basis for only a brief time now. It was set to be free on a blanket basis for two weeks after its February 2 launch date. Because of glitches that some new users were experiencing, that date got pushed back. For a while, though, a pop-up window has greeted Daily readers encouraging them to buy subscriptions. And apparently enough people are doing so to push the app to the top of the “top grossing” list, meaning that its total revenue is the highest in the App Store. (It is not in the top ten most downloaded.) We still don’t know how many people are reading the thing — or even for how long people are buying their subscriptions out in advance. But they’re competing with popular one-time paid apps, magazine apps (like New York’s) that require a new purchase every issue, and free apps that charge for in-app content, so for now this sounds — at surface level, at least — like good news for the fledgling publication.
