As Rene just mentioned in the previous post, we're getting sales numbers for various iPhone apps and these sales numbers are very, very promising. John Casasanta of development house Tap Tap Tap hit us up on our tip line about his article on the sales figures at the App Store.
Early on, folks in the Blogosphere were able to get a handle on sales figures simply by checking the download count at the bottom of each page. Apple apparently decided that developers might just want to keep some of that info private, so that was taken down around the same time that Apple started actually delivering real sales numbers to developers. Many of these developers, as Rene mentioned, are just going ahead and publishing these sales numbers despite, as Casasanta says, traditional business instincts to hide exact numbers because they don't want to seem to be bragging or (if things aren't going well), failing.
But these numbers are news because of their sheer size -- it's almost as if developers are compelled to share in the same way we might if we'd, say, won the lottery. "Look, I know it's not nice to brag, but Holy Crap Look At This."