During Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, CEO Tim Cook announced that the iTunes and App Store have 575 million store accounts and noted that Apple believes it has more accounts with credit cards than any other company on the Internet.
Asymco's Horace Dediu yesterday used the new figure to take a look at the value of an Apple user to the company. By plotting Apple's previous milestones all the way back to 2009, Dediu found that Apple is adding about 500,000 new iTunes accounts a day and that the company is on pace to add another 100 million accounts by the end of the year.
Dediu also found that iTunes revenue per account is approximately $40 per year, about half the amount seen in 2009.
One would expect such a decline as an user base expands and this approximate 50% decline in revenues per account seems reasonable for a six-fold base increase. In absolute terms the graph shows that an iTunes account generates about $3.2/month in transactions. Put another way, during the last year, an average of $40/yr of economic value is generated by every iTunes account.The report goes on to extend the analysis to company-wide revenue and enterprise value per account holder as proxies for determine how much a single customer is worth to the company and how much that customer is valued by stockholders.
In early June, Morgan Stanley analyst Katy Huberty noted that Apple's large number of iTunes/App Store accounts offer significant potential for growth in services. And at his D11 interview, Cook touted iMessage, iTunes Store and FaceTime as examples of how Apple's services are tying together Apple's ecosystem, with Cook emphasizing that the "magic" happens at the interaction of hardware, software, and services.
30 comments
Motorola's latest P30 smartphone is making headlines this week, but not for an impressive feature set or a unique design. As it turns out, Motorola has opted to copy the design of the iPhone X,...
In a statement, Apple has confirmed that no personal data was compromised by a 16-year-old student from Melbourne, Australia who admitted to hacking into Apple's internal servers on multiple...
Apple will launch its much-rumored "entry-level" MacBook in September, according to a report by DigiTimes outlining Apple's upcoming product launches. The website says the new MacBook...
Twitter's API changes went live today, disabling key features for third-party apps like Tweetbot and Twitterific.
The new API removes timeline streaming, preventing third-party apps from...
Verizon and Apple last week announced a partnership that provides six free months of Apple Music service to new and existing customers with a Verizon Unlimited plan, and as of today, Verizon...
Apple's second-generation iPhone X, and a widely expected 6.5-inch model dubbed the iPhone X Plus, will both be compatible with the Apple Pencil, according to Taiwanese publication Economic Daily...
Apple today seeded the eighth beta of an upcoming iOS 12 update to developers for testing purposes, just a few days after seeding the seventh beta and more than two months after introducing the new...
Apple will release a new MacBook Air at the end of the third quarter, according to Taiwanese research firm TrendForce. That lines up with either September or October, depending on how the wording is...
