Apple iTunes just passed the 50 Billion download mark

Lucy winner

A couple of weeks ago Apple announced the 50B download competition. It is now too late to enter as someone, currently unknown is the lucky winner of the $10K iTunes card.

Let’s stop and look at the iTunes business and relate this back to an earlier post about the value of the eco system. The 50 billion number includes all apps globally some of course free and some paid for. That’s just the app store and does not include all the content: Books, Songs, Movies and in store purchases.

So just how big is the Apple content store?

Apple have expanded the iTunes store and now offer:

• Music is now available in 119 countries.
• The Music catalogue now consists of 35 million songs.
• Movies are available in 109 countries. 60,000 titles are offered.
• iBookstores are present in 155 countries offering 1.75 million iBooks.
• There are iTunes App Stores in 155 countries whose residents make up about 90% of the world’s population.
• Apple iOS developers have created more than 850,000 iOS apps, including 350,000 made specifically for the iPad.

In the latest quarter the iTunes top line grew by 32% to just over $4 billion (a new high) and the company suggests that this rate is maintainable by stating it has a “$16 billion annual run rate”. The pattern of revenues is shown below with graphs care of Asymco.

• The content portion of iTunes revenues was $2.4 billion, up from $2.1 billion sequentially. Growth into Q1 is not unusual as many holiday iTunes gift cards are redeemed during January.
• Revenue growth has been surprisingly steady, averaging 29%/quarter for more than six years.

• The company reports that over 800 apps are downloaded per second. Including all media, the download rate is now above 1000 items per second. Estimated download rates by media types are shown below (note: first graph is plotted on a log scale):

• App developers have been paid over $9 billion for their sales through the App Store including $4.5 billion in the most recent four quarters. I estimate the split between media types as follows:

• Canalys estimates that sales from iTunes App Store accounted for 74% of all app sales worldwide in the March quarter.

• iOS app revenues more than doubled year-over-year.