Flipboard CEO Mike McCue took the stage today with TechCrunch Editor-in-Chief Erick Schonfeld, talking about the future of tablet publishing.
He revealed that the app has hit 3.5 million downloads in a year and two months, and has gone from 250 million flips per month to 550 million flips per month in the four months since June. Last time we checked in the app had seen over 2.5 million downloads and with 11.4 million “Flips” per day (which can be likened to pageviews).
The 3.5 million figure is impressive considering Apple has said that it will have sold a total of 35 million iPads in 18 months.
McCue said that the peak hours for the app are between 8pm-10pm at night, and then first thing in the morning. “The tablet is creating a totally new kind of consumption experience, the kind of experience people have dreamed about for years,” said McCue, holding HTML5, social media and the rise of the tablet in the one and 1/2 years since the iPad’s creation as the harbingers of this change in content consumption habits.
Flipboard received $50 million in financing from Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures and others at the beginning of this year. On that funding: “As an entrepreneur I’ve learned that you’ve got to have runway … you need a lot of funding to pull that off.”