It’s great when brands release real data about the success of their mobile strategy (and generally they only release it when they are successful). Absolute Radio released some figures about their mobile audience this week, which makes for some interesting reading. The radio station has focussed it’s mobile offering in a series of apps for listening to their various channels. They have no mobile site, and do very little by way of SMS-based engagement. Their eggs are very much in the app basket.

They tell us they had 222,000 ‘active’ app users in January and each user accessed it an average of 7.5 times. These are very good results. Most free apps, especially branded free apps are used just once or never at all. How does it compare to their broadcast listening figures? In December the station was listed to by 1.375 million people each week with an average of 6.9 hours per person. That makes their mobile audience to be a whopping 16% of their total share. Pretty good going. However, this comparison is not really like for like. App access rates (especially if there are push alerts etc) are not really a sign of user engagement. How long were they listening to the station for? Were they listening to the station or doing something else in the app? Lets hope that one day we can see some real data that compares the broadcast and mobile channel.