Apple now has one billion paid subscriptions

On Thursday, Apple announced its fiscal third-quarter earnings and in a surprise announcement has declared that it has hit the milestone one billion paid subscriptions landmark across Services and the App Store.

Apple has been inching closer to one billion paid subscriptions, especially as its own Services division continues to rake in the money regularly. Now, following the latest earnings, the company has confirmed it has one billion paid subscribers on its platform.

While that includes Apple's first-party services, the company reached the major milestone thanks to third-party services as well. Apple counts every subscription that is made through the App Store directly, as well as other services on its platform.

Apple reached 900 million paid subscribers by the fourth quarter of 2022. And in May of 2023, the company confirmed it had achieved 975 million paid subscribers on its platform.

Apple's Services division has been raking in money for years now, and that trend continued with the company's latest fiscal quarterly earnings report. Apple managed to haul in $21.21 billion in revenue this quarter, a jump of 8% from the previous year.

All told, Apple earned $81.80 billion in revenue in the third fiscal quarter of 2023. The company's board of directors confirmed shareholders will receive a cash dividend of $0.24 per share.

5 Comments

eightzero 3145 comments · 14 Years

About 1 year ago

Seems like maybe they could give that billionth subscriber a little something.

applebynature 119 comments · 9 Years

Your headline and the first two sentences are FALSE. It's subscribers, not subscriptions. They likely have had several billion subscriptions for quite a while. This new milestone is stating that there are 1 Billion individual people who have at least one subscription of some kind through Apple. It's an important distinction and one that I'm not surprised AI got wrong in the freakin headline itself.

davidw 2112 comments · 17 Years

applebynature said:

Your headline and the first two sentences are FALSE. It's subscribers, not subscriptions. They likely have had several billion subscriptions for quite a while. This new milestone is stating that there are 1 Billion individual people who have at least one subscription of some kind through Apple. It's an important distinction and one that I'm not surprised AI got wrong in the freakin headline itself.

What you are saying can't possibly be correct. There are only 1B unique iPhone users and 2B Apple devices in use. But the bulk of those users of Apple devices, like the Apple Watch, AirPods, Home Pods. AirTags, etc. are used by people that owns an iPhone, these would not be unique users. The Apple TV is a rounding error. The iPad might be the only Apple device where a good percents might not own an iPhone. So let's be conservative and say that there are 1.25B unique Apple device users. So what you're saying is that 1B of those 1.25B unique Apple device users, subscribes to at least 1 paid subscription services with their Apple device. That is a huge percentage. That amounts to nearly every iPhone user is a subscriber.

Apple counts a subscriber as a user that pays for a subscription to any one of the numbers of services from which Apple derides revenue from. Including to third parties in their Apple App Store. If a user subscribes to Apple Music and Apple TV+, that one individual user counts as 2 subscribers. And if the same individual also pays for a WSJ subscription using the Apple App Store, he counts as 3 subscribers.

Think about this ......... "Apple reached 900 million paid "subscribers" by the fourth quarter of 2022. And in May of 2023, the company confirmed it had achieved 975 million paid "subscribers" on its platform." This means that if Apple is now at 1B "subscribers", they got 100M new "subscribers" in the past 9 months. In the past 9 months, Apple did not gain anywhere close to 100M new unique individuals to their platform. They only sold about 180M iPhones and out of those over 80% of them were purchased by iPhone users upgrading. That don't leave a lot of room for 100M new " individual subscribers".

Apple "paid subscription" number is the same as their "subscriber" number. It has to work this way. Say that there are 40M Apple users that subscribes to Apple TV+ and 85M Apple users that subscribes to Apple Music. And out of those 125M subscribers, 25M subscribes to both. Apple will say that between Apple TV+ and Apple Music there are 125M subscribers. Even though there are only 100M individual subscribers between them.

carnegie 1082 comments · 10 Years

applebynature said:

Your headline and the first two sentences are FALSE. It's subscribers, not subscriptions. They likely have had several billion subscriptions for quite a while. This new milestone is stating that there are 1 Billion individual people who have at least one subscription of some kind through Apple. It's an important distinction and one that I'm not surprised AI got wrong in the freakin headline itself.

That's not what Apple said in both its SEC filing and in its conference call yesterday. Apple says that it passed one billion paid subscriptions, not one billion paid subscribers.

carnegie said:

applebynature said:

Your headline and the first two sentences are FALSE. It's subscribers, not subscriptions. They likely have had several billion subscriptions for quite a while. This new milestone is stating that there are 1 Billion individual people who have at least one subscription of some kind through Apple. It's an important distinction and one that I'm not surprised AI got wrong in the freakin headline itself.

That's not what Apple said in both its SEC filing and in its conference call yesterday. Apple says that it passed one billion paid subscriptions, not one billion paid subscribers.

Yup, my bad, I was absolutely incorrect.
AI said it both ways in this article though