“When Apple’s iTunes Store and App Store were taken out of commission on Wednesday thanks to a DNS issue, iPhone, iPad and Mac owners couldn’t purchase apps, songs, movies or books,” Jeff Gamet writes for The Mac Observer. “It took Apple 12 hours to get their systems up and running again, costing the company about US$25 million in lost sales.”
“Missing out on $25 million in sales doesn’t sound like much for the most valuable company in the world, but for app developers who make their living from those sales, yesterday’s outage had to hurt at least a little,” Gamet writes. “Last year, Apple paid out $10 billion to app developers, or about $27 million a day, leaving app makers short $13.5 million during the App Store’s down time.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: The sales weren’t lost if people simply came back later to buy what they wanted. It’s difficult to calculate exactly how much money was actually lost and how much was simply delayed.
Related articles:
Apple apologizes for widespread service outage – March 11, 2015
Apple’s iTunes, app stores, iCloud services experience outages worldwide – March 11, 2015
Exactly MDN. No tangible ‘loss’. It would be different if there was a competitive ‘store’ to buy your apps. Like if you went to Walmart to buy some toilet paper but they were closed, so you go to Target. That would be Walmart’s tangible loss.
Agreed on apps, but there are competitors in the music and book realms. Oh, wait, didn’t Apple put the book sellers out of business with their price fixing scheme? 😛
And the math in the article seems flawed. If Apple lost out on $25M in revenues, then the 30% that goes to developers would only be $7.5M, not $13.5M.
In addition, as pointed out by others, these sales are not all lost. Most of them, except for some impulse buys and such, we’re just delayed.
Whether you agree with the philosophically or not, the “freemium” games likely lost income that won’t be recovered at a later date because people did something else then play the game, or played the game without being able to buy the in-app purchase.
Those tend to be more of an impulse buy and that opportunity was missed.
On the flip side, Apple has done more to help those games make money in the long haul, so I can give them a pass on this one, as long as these things don’t become regular occurrences.
Yes because an Apple store site temporarily down will drive panicking people off to buy PC’s and Android phones instead. NOT.
I’ve used the iTunes Store since its inception and this is the first time I can remember it’s ever been down for an extended period.
Not bad uptime if you ask me. Lessons will be learnt. Move on.
That’s like saying that Apple looses $25 million every time they close the the online Apple Store just before big announcements of new products.
Colossal fuck UP
It’s not your fault, you were born that way.
Well they do lose SOME amount every time the store closes. I can’t tell you what it is, but I can estimate my own losses from my app by looking at daily sales.
And yeah, app dev will get some of the revenues back the next day, but probably not 100%. But we can observe that too. It’s not rocket science.
My wife just told me that when that was going on she was trying to download some game apps. She couldn’t understand what was going on and thought she broke her iPad. She’s so cute.
Can someone please explain to me why I am supposed to give a shit about this relatively minor hiccup in the grand scheme of things? It’s almost as if Apple bloggers (and haters) expect Apple to be infallible, while normal people and actual Apple customers understand that shit happens. Hiccups happen with complex systems from time to time. It’s to be expected, and this is nothing new. The world hasn’t stopped turning. Do not panic.
I dont think the sales loss is a concern for Apple or the developers or at least that is not what should concern Apple.
Main point is that Apple Inc. kept everyone informed. Their support web page was clear on the outage timeline per service, so a non issue.