Apple Adding Roughly 500,000 New iTunes Accounts A Day

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.