Image: Dan Frommer, Business Insider
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Apple is spending about $113 million a month — or more than $1.3 billion a year — to run iTunes and the App Store.
That’s according to analysis by Horace Dediu, who took new numbers revealed last week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and plugged them in alongside past data.
He used well-reported statistics about Apple’s split of music sales and app sales. He also took Apple at its word that it operates the services on or slightly above a break even basis.
Dediu estimates that most of the money goes into serving content and processing transactions, but also thinks there’s now a lot left over for capacity increases, and expects that a lot of Apple’s capital expenditures on its new data center in North Carolina came out of this pot.