iTunes now costs $1.3 billion per year to run

Andre Yoskowitz
14 Jun 2011 10:37

The latest report from Asymco says it now costs Apple $1.3 billion to run iTunes on a yearly basis.
Horace Dediu used the numbers from Apple’s latest quarterly earnings and then cross referenced them average prices for music and apps to get a “content margin.”
The numbers used were:

15 Billion iTunes song downloads
130 million book downloads
14 billion app downloads
$2.5 billion paid to developers
225 million accounts
425k apps
90k iPad apps
100k game and entertainment titles
50 million game center accounts

Dediu estimates the monthly content margin now comes in at $113 million, which the editor believes all goes back into running the store and paying for traffic/payment processing and increasing storage capacity.