Another PR approach from a company representing TocMag, who sent me a press release about their usage figures. A quick scraping of their top magazine stats (kudos to them for publishing figures)and a dusting-off of rusting Perl skills gave me this graph:

 

What I take away from this is that TocMag content is more dominated by larger players than I'd have expected; the curve seems steeper than yer classic "long tail". About half the mags have negligible readership, I'd say. The top 5 mags make up 25% of all downloads, the top 12 make up over 50% of it.

The "dumbass" series of magazines seems incredibly popular, making up about a quarter of all downloads. I went to download this and was presented with a choice of either a Java download or 3GP file. Actually, something worrying here: every time I went to this page, the download counter for the mag increased. So their download counts aren't actually downloads (i.e. folks successfully getting a piece of content onto their phone), but rather visits to the specific page on the TocMag site. Actually downloading the 3GP file (of someone falling off a travelator) or the Java app didn't affect the figure.

Weirdly, the 3GP and the Java app contained different content. The Java app was a slideshow of a few images, fairly poorly presented - though the presentation was probably down to the folks who set up the mag, the overall feel of the app wasn't particularly slick.