The Guardian has just reported the launch of its latest app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, marking another far-reaching initiative from the print media industry. This app is now free to download from Apple’s app store, and boasts of several improved features, like award-winning video, reader comments on articles, improved live blogs, sports scores, a topic-based search engine.

As reported on Guardian’s official blog, this new app has been developed after taking into account the success of their old app. The new app is available in a subscription model at £2.99 for 6 months and £3.99 for 12 months.  Janine Gibson, editor, guardian.co.uk, says, “The app has an unrivalled range of customisable features, impressive automatic news and sport updates and an excellent new archive search. It is essentially guardian.co.uk in your pocket, providing intuitive access to our thought-provoking journalism.”

Guardian’s old app was launched in December 2009 and ever since its release, it has seen over 2,00,000 downloads. It also experienced good user retention with over 75 percent of them using in on monthly basis. Over 50 percent accessed the app every week and 25 percent used every day. Taking into account higher expectations of its customers, it decided to offer broad range of content and more frequent updates to its customers.

Print media is really hoping that smartphones and tablets can get them back to big profits. So far that hasn’t been the case, as we saw iPad magazine sales dropping steeply after a brief hike last year, in spite of increasing iPad sales. This trend is quite evident from the report of Audit Bureau of Circulations, which collects magazine circulation data from companies.

Wired was averaging 31,000 downloads from July through September, had 22,000 and 23,000 respectively in October and November. Other magazines have seen similar declines: Vanity Fair sold 8,700 downloads of its November issue, down from an average of about 10,500 from August through October; GQ sold 11,000 copies, its worst showing yet.

This was a really bad news for print publishers, who expected the iPad to kick off their sales exponentially. So, monetizing mobile publications is something of huge interest right now. Looking to take advantage of new mobile platforms despite the industry’s bumpy start, Popular science has also teamed up with an ad agency; Crispin Porter + Bogusky to make better mobile ads for tablet magazines.

“If you look at ads right now, there are some magazines that are trying to incorporate all the ads from the print magazine, and they’re flat ads with some links,” said Megan Miller, Bonnier’s R&D program director. “Some of them have interesting features like 360 rotation, some have videos. But we don’t think that as a whole, the advertising has reached its potential. Even if in the short term we might not be getting the kind of volumes we have in print, it’s going to emerge as a leading technology, and we need to be there when that does occur,” she added.

Finally, Apple is also looking for more ways to monetize digital publications. If rumors are believed, they suggest that the company is looking to earn more profits from subscriptions. This will have a considerable impact on publications as they might also search for collaboration and set their pricing strategies.