Taptu, a mobile search company that has pivoted into news reading, has seen explosive growth after launching its “news DJ” app on the iPad and Android tablets.
Downloads increased 500 percent since Taptu launched its iPad app in April, accounting for 50 percent of total downloads, CEO Mitch Lazar told VentureBeat last week.
Notably, Taptu didn’t waste any time with its Android 3.0 tablet app, which launched just a few weeks after the iPad version. Lazar tells me that iOS users doubled, and Android users increased 187 percent, since the company launched its iPad app.
Tablets have clearly been a godsend for Taptu. The company had iPhone and Android phone versions of its app out for some time, but its news reading technology had more of a chance to shine on tablets with larger screens. And with the release of its iPad app, Taptu also added the ability to “DJ” your news — basically, to mix and match your news from different sources.
Taptu’s early commitment to Android has also paid off. The company is seeing more downloads on iOS than Android, but Lazar tells me that Android users are three times more engaged with the app. While iPhone and iPad users generally use the app 3.5 times a week to read 25 stories, Android users on average use the app nine times a week and read 60 stories. As of last week, 40 percent of Taptu’s users were on Android, while 60 percent were on iOS.
Since April, Taptu has seen a 400 percent increase in daily users on both iOS and Android. 70 to 75 percent of its latest rush of downloads have turned into steady monthly customers, while 25 percent have become weekly customers. Lazar says that the company is now serving more than 140,000 unique news streams daily. Additionally, Taptu now features 80,000 custom news feeds built with its DJ tool — five times the amount of curated streams the company initially offered.
Taptu is competing directly against other social news reading apps like FlipBoard and Pulse. But the plethora of news reading apps is a good thing. Every app approaches news reading in a different way, so now users have a better chance of finding an app that works for them. Taptu’s approach will likely win over fans of Pulse, which has a similar interface.
Taptu is based in Cambridge, England and Denver, Colorado.
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