Since being selected as the iTunes Rewind iPhone Game of the Year, the free-to-play game Tiny Tower has seen its daily active user count grow by more than 16,000 players a day, according to NimbleBit co-founder Ian Marsh.

The game now has more than 1 million daily active users, up from the 600,000 it had in mid-December, and just passed nine million total downloads. One million of those downloads have come in the last 30 days, a statistic that handily illustrates what many developers already suspected — an endorsement from Apple can be extremely lucrative.

Tiny Tower’s conversion rate has also been impressive, as Marsh tells us approximately 50 percent of downloaders in the past month have become active players, making the game the most popular it has ever been.

“It is essentially a second launch for the game at the best possible time of the year which is better than anything we could have planned ourselves,” Marsh explains. “Having all those additional players and new fans around will be instrumental in the launch of our next game.”

While Marsh would not reveal anything about NimbleBit’s upcoming title, he did tell us that Bitizens — the colorful inhabitants of Tiny Tower — would feature in it.

According to our traffic tracking service AppData, since being named as Apple’s iPhone Game of the Year, Tiny Tower has not left the top 10 on the top grossing iPhone app charts. As reported in an earlier interview Inside Mobile Apps did with NimbleBit, approximately five percent of Tiny Tower players convert to paid users, with each paying user giving the game an average of $10.

Tiny Tower received another boost earlier this year when it was nominated for the Game Developer’s Choice award for best handheld or mobile game of the year, the first time GCD has selected a free-to-play game for the honor. “We’re extremely honored for Tiny Tower to be nominated,” says Marsh of the selection. “It is exciting to see free to play games getting some industry getting positive attention.”