How much is an active user worth?

Apple has sold 700 million iOS devices, and Google claims 1 billion devices have been activated; Microsoft has about 1.5 billion Windows users, while Facebook has almost 1.19 billion; Amazon has 215 million active accounts and PayPal has 137 million. These figures have a secretive connection to the stock prices of companies, such as a Twitter user worth 110 of dollars, while Facebook is 98 dollars and LinkedIn is 93 dollars.

This "consistency" shows the "universally accepted value" of social media users, but how much is the user value of an ecosystem?

Apple, Google, Microsoft and even Amazon are all eager for their eco-chains to be more valuable, not just to the community, because the eco-chain can lift economic activity to a higher level.

Theoretically, we can create countless "media" that can measure the continued value of social media users if we can estimate their users. Fortunately, Asymco has enough data to do so.

Based on the total number of iOS devices sold per quarter, we were able to measure the user installation base of the device. Coupled with some hypothetical "retirement" and wastage rates, we can draw the following "history":

Because the total number of itunes accounts has a certain regularity, we add it to the chart. To provide a "scale", Asymco also introduced iphone user survey data from 5 countries in the United States and Europe.

Eventually, the chart gives an active user an "upper bound" (itunes account number) and a "lower bound" (ICloud) to calibrate analysts ' valuations. The result is "about 500 million" (the error is not written 4.82), "The monthly growth of about 11 million".

So the iOS ecosystem has about 500 million active users, so how much value do these users create? The answer lies in Apple's comprehensive report on itunes revenue: $4.26 billion a quarter.

In addition, the average quarterly expenditure for iOS users is as follows from a number of media reports related to retailing and adoption:

In the past 12 months, iOS users have contributed an average of 48 dollars a year to the eco-chain. In addition, in most cases, they also purchased equipment and paid service charges to mobile operators. They may also contribute to other ecosystems while browsing or online shopping. But for Apple, the amount per user contributes 48 dollars a year.

As for Twitter, the company's revenue last year was 317 million dollars. But with the growth of its user base, each user is now able to contribute 1.36 dollars a year to the company. While this number is only 1/35 of iOS users contribute through itunes and icloud, it's worth noting that iOS has about twice times as many users as Twitter.

Of course, people can also argue that the activity of iOS users does not bring benefits to Apple, or at least the market does not--the company has a huge cash flow from itunes, but the cost of its data center and bandwidth is absolutely minimal.

In other words, users will continue to pay for the services that are enough to please them (especially the monthly ones), but the market will only feel that throwing money at the service would do little to boost sales and even lower profits.

For this apparently misleading mind-set, it is time to think carefully about who is being fooled.

[Compiled from: Asymco]