As 2012 draws to a close, one start­up has cause to feel very sat­is­fied with its achieve­ments: Onswipe, which spe­cial­izes in build­ing touch­screen-opti­mized web­sites for pub­lish­ers, ends the year with 44 mil­lion vis­i­tors access­ing con­tent through its plat­form and 10 mil­lion active users every month on iOS alone.

Chief tech­nol­o­gy offi­cers, prod­uct man­agers and busi­ness devel­op­ment asso­ciates alike will be intrigued by how the start­up, which launched in 2011, achieved its suc­cess. Giv­en that News Corps’ tablet-focused pub­li­ca­tion The Dai­ly recent­ly fold­ed, oppor­tu­ni­ties for busi­ness growth in the touch-screen mar­ket might look a tad inauspicious.

Move over desk­tops — the world’s going mobile

But Onswipe’s CEO and co-founder Jason Bap­tiste is clear that the medi­um wasn’t the prob­lem: it was, he says, the publication’s pay­wall that hob­bled it — that, and expect­ing peo­ple to down­load an app to access it.  The Daily’s shut­down, Bap­tiste insists, doesn’t alter the fact that the world is migrat­ing from the desk­top in a big way.

Crunch­ing sup­plied by Quant­cast mobile traf­fic data for Tum­blr and WordPress.com, Bap­tiste has cal­cu­lat­ed that, between them, they account for over 3.2 mil­lion unique iPad vis­i­tors to Onswipe-tweaked con­tent in the US.

72 per cent of the firm’s vis­its come from the US, although there are small but sig­nif­i­cant num­bers from else­where, too.  The UK accounts for 6.6 per cent, Cana­da 4.8 per cent, and Aus­tralia 2.7 per cent. Col­lec­tive­ly, well over half (61 per cent) chose to view con­tent in por­trait mode, while 39 per cent did so in landscape.

Big things in 2013?

Bap­tiste is bull­ish about his company’s prospects for 2013, which he says will be “a very sig­nif­i­cant rev­enue year.” So far, the firm’s empha­sis has been on build­ing its pub­lish­er net­work and audi­ence; but there’ll be a shift in accent come the New Year. A new suite of ad prod­ucts is in the pipeline, aimed not sim­ply at improv­ing pub­lish­ers’ mobile pres­ence but deliv­er­ing “large increas­es in revenue.”

As it pro­claims on its web­site, Onswipe makes it “insane­ly easy for a pub­lish­er of any size to make their exist­ing con­tent a beau­ti­ful app-like expe­ri­ence in the brows­er.” And the approach is pay­ing off – the firm appoint­ed its first chief rev­enue offi­cer, Jared Hand, in August. Pub­lish­ers appear to like the Onswipe effect and are will­ing to pay for it.