Apple May Just Be Breaking Even With App Store

From DailyTech: Apple's App Store helped establish the iPhone as a top seller, and was arguably one of Apple’s most visible properties. With Apple recently passing the 1 billion downloads mark; some analysts took to estimating Apple's net income from the store.

Apple Insider, a blog which closely tracks Apple's metrics, released its estimates. It believes that Apple has only sold 25 to 50 million paid apps. This equates, based on average paid app cost, to approximately $70M to $160M USD in total revenue. However, of this, $49M to $112M USD goes to the developers. This leaves, according to estimates, Apple with somewhere around $20M to $50M USD in revenue from the store.

Such a figure is still a lot for pure profit. Apple also gets a $99 per year fee from each individual developer and a $299 per year fee from development firms. Over 50,000 developers are currently registered, meaning that Apple pulls in an addition $5M USD in registration fees.

However, Apple's gains are offset by significant operating costs -- the most significant of which are likely advertising and serving costs. Apple also has to pay for App store administrators, as well as budget for a sizeable team of engineers to develop the SDK. In all, Apple may just be breaking even, or at most pulling in $10-20M USD (though it obviously makes more indirectly, via selling more phones).

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