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Comment by smackfu | Hacker News Reader

Too bad Apple doesn't break it down a bit:

iTunes music: must make money. There is no review process, the labels handle everything, and the file sizes are tiny.

iBooks: Probably loses money, based on a gut feeling for how many people are actually buying books on iBooks vs Amazon.

Mac App Store: Probably losing money at this point.

iOS App Store: Could be break even I suppose. Obviously lose money on free apps, plus the review process can't be cheap.

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I would have called music the least likely one to be making money, actually. A common usage pattern is buying one or two songs in a sitting, at which point transaction charges really become significant, and it has always seemed that the record labels take the lion's share of the payment.

iTunes TV, on the other hand, is probably more profitable, due to higher unit cost. Books almost _must_ be profitable, because they're in the same range as Kindle books, and Amazon wouldn't be pushing ebooks (and thus damaging their traditional book market) so hard if they couldn't make a profit on them.

Good points. I assume Apple is paying very low transaction fees, but they would have to be very low to make $1.29 transactions profitable.

Have you ever noticed how they bulk bill you for all your transactions, a few days after purchase?

Interestingly the books are listed as downloads rather than sales. I wonder how may of those were free? Does it include winnie the pooh?

>iOS App Store: Could be break even I suppose. Obviously lose money on free apps, plus the review process can't be cheap.

Free apps still need a $99/yr developer fee, though one could submit a whole lot of free apps.

I just looked and Apple hires iOS reviewers as full-time US employees with a CS degree. No salary listed, but I would guess that's around $100/hr cost to Apple. So one hour spent on reviewing a free app and now Apple is losing money.

After the first, because you still have to register as a developer

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