Up until recently, the revenue model for SkyFire‘s smartphone browser (you know, the one that converts Flash Video on-the-fly for playback on handsets that otherwise could never touch it?) wasn’t too clear. Its biggest feature, the video transcoding, required hefty proxy servers and a good amount of bandwidth, and those things don’t come cheap — and yet, they were just giving the browser away.
That all ended with the launch of SkyFire for iPhone. They started charging $2.99 a pop — and within 3 days, they’d grossed roughly a million dollars in sales. SkyFire followed up a few weeks later with SkyFire for iPad, which they managed to get into the App Store at $4.99 just nights before one of the biggest App sales days of the year: Christmas. The result? Another million bucks.
We’ve got this information exclusively for now, but sometime this week (tonight, perhaps?) SkyFire will be announcing that they’ve surpassed 200,000 sales of their iPad application. 200,000 copies at $5 brings their grand grossing total up to a cool $1,000,000 — though after Apple shaves off their cut, they’re looking at more like $700,000.
Either way, that’s not too shabby for 3 weeks on the market. It’s not nearly as cool of a feat as pulling off a million in 3 days as the iPhone port did — but given that there are many millions more iPhones out there than there are iPads, it’s still pretty damn respectable.
SkyFire’s gotta be hoping that Apple doesn’t budge on their stance against Flash anytime soon.
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