To go along with the resurgence of interest in all things Nokia with the N8 availability, the Nokia Blog today brought forth a number of statistics on the Ovi services, with a focus on the Ovi Store. It’s receiving 2.3 million downloads a day, with 70 developers now having had over one million downloads. Those are some nice numbers, and Nokia are right to be proud. But there is room for improvement.

It’s smart to go over the statistics again and ensuring they are front and centre when people are discussing the release of the Nokia N8 this week and the ambiguous “return of Nokia” (not that their sales figures saw them going away), and make no mistake, these are good statistics.

More numbers... the store is available in 190 countries; there are 11 million tracks in the Ovi Music catalogue; 140 million Ovi users worldwide using the services; trips navigation by Ovi maps would circle the globe 80 times. It’s all good. But these are statistics, so it’s possible to question them and wonder what the other stories are that aren’t mentioned. For example, given Nokia’s sales rate of 260,000 phones a day, gathering ‘only’ 200,000 new Ovi Users a day gives a conversion rate of around 76%. That’s a figure that I suspect Nokia would like to drive higher.

On the other hand, those are all voluntary sign-ups. While Android and iOS will have 100% sign ups due to the activation process on the handsets, those are all forced registrations to switch the phone on. So before anyone beats up Nokia with a stick on this one, consider how open a phone is which needs to be registered with the OS vendor before you can make a call.

What else stands out as the big question that people are going to ask? Looking at all the good news around the Ovi Store, there is one topic I think that’s going to crop up. “Show us the money.”

A million downloads for 70 developers leads to more questions. Is that of a single application each or for their whole line-up? How many of those downloads were free (or lite) versions of a full application? What’s the ratio of free to purchased downloads? Has the Ovi Store made anyone a millionaire yet?

I know that the big money success stories will be at the top of a long tail, but it’s these stories that will make the Ovi Store an attractive proposition to developers looking at the Symbian platform. There is very little that is more attractive than the idea of easy money.

Pushing the success stories in terms of cold hard cash, as well as the headline numbers, is needed. How long till Nokia (in conjunction with the top developers) are confident to let those numbers out? Because that’s likely to be the next step in the “PR story” around the Ovi Store.

More on the numbers at Nokia Conversations.

-- Ewan Spence