App Store Piracy Losses Estimated At $459 Million

An anonymous reader passes along this quote from a report at 24/7 Wall St.: "There have been over 3 billion downloads since the inception of the App Store. Assuming the proportion of those that are paid apps falls in the middle of the Bernstein estimate, 17% or 510 million of these were paid applications. Based on our review of current information, paid applications have a piracy rate of around 75%. That supports the figure that for every paid download, there have been 3 pirated downloads. That puts the number of pirate downloads at 1.53 billion. If the average price of a paid application is $3, that is $4.59 billion dollars in losses split between Apple and the application developers. That is, of course, assuming that all of those pirates would have made purchases had the application not been available to them for free. This is almost certainly not the case. A fair estimate of the proportion of people who would have used the App Store if they did not use pirated applications is about 10%. This estimate yields about $459 million in lost revenue for Apple and application developers." A response posted at Mashable takes issue with some of the figures, particularly the 75% piracy rate. While such rates have been seen with game apps, it's unclear whether non-game apps suffer the same fate.

'Losses'

[Spatial]

I'm suffering massive losses too - nobody gave a billion dollars yesterday! That's a billion dollar loss in a single day!

In other news.

[Anonymous Coward]

Big made up number is still made up.

Guesstimations...

[alexhs]

I'm pretty sure that by tweaking a little their formula and figures, we can compute the probability of the article's authors to get laid with an alien life form.

Re:How does it work?

[raynet]

Works just fine.

Re:'Losses'

[sonnejw0]

That's called "opportunity costs", and it's a good way for businesses to cook their books, I mean lower their taxes.