Major League Baseball
Is Apple more popular than baseball?
May 8, 2011: 8:02 AM ETFour times as many people now visit Apple Stores as go to Major League Baseball games
Click to enlarge. Sources: IFOAppleStore.com, fangraphs.com
A throw-away stat on Business Insider last month comparing the number of visitors to Apple's (AAPL) retail stores last quarter (71.1 million, down from 74.5 million during the Christmas quarter) to Major League Baseball attendance figures for the entire 2010 season (73.6 million) got me thinking.
Could it be that Apple is more popular than America's national sport?
The company is certainly more profitable than professional baseball. Apple's revenue for fiscal year 2010 was $65.2 billion, $9.8 billion from the Apple stores alone, compared with the MLB's total revenue of $7 billion.
And as the chart above shows, visitors to the Apple stores -- which will celebrate their 10th anniversary next week -- overtook attendance at Major League Baseball stadiums in 2006 and never looked back.
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Should Major League Baseball content providers charge one price for all?
If it doesn't find a solution, the MLB could find itself with a consumer riot.
By Kevin Maney, contributor
From Major League Baseball's point of view, content providers are going to have to figure out how to charge one price for aggregated packages of content. Otherwise, consumers are going to rebel against "a la carte creep," said MLB.com CEO Bob Bowman in a lunch session at Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference.
"It's not that MORE
Jul 23, 2010 5:49 PM ET
