Apple recently announced that it has achieved 10 billion downloads in its iTunes App store, an impressive feat no matter how you look at it—unless you’re looking at it from a revenue standpoint.
Now no one would accuse Apple of getting off to anything other than a spectacular start in the mobile business -- including jump-starting the mobile apps explosion.
Yet last year, even as mobile app downloads increased 233$, revenues from iTunes jumped just 23%. Now certainly the bulk of iTunes business is in moving low margin songs. But it's also clear that although: iPhone customers are downloading a lot of apps, but they’re not paying for them.
Over at Connected Planet, we take a deeper look at this conundrum, and especially its similarity to the challenges of mobile operators to grow overall revenue even as mobile data usage explodes:
For operators, overall data usage is booming, but revenues aren’t necessarily keeping up. Data revenues are most certainly increasing quickly, but not at the lightning-fast pace of overall data consumption.
The difference, of course, is that Apple is in the hardware business. It certainly doesn’t want to take a loss on content or data consumption. But as a break-even venture, especially if the App Store continues to fuel i-device sales, Apple is feeling just swell.
Read the rest of the story at Connected Planet: Just like operators, Apple learning mobile data boom doesn’t equate to booming revenues
