Extrapolating from metrics provided by CEO Steve Jobs during his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote earlier this month–$1 billion paid to developers for five billion free and paid app downloads–Munster figures the App Store has contributed only $189 million to Apple’s total gross profit since it launched.

That’s about one percent of Apple’s (AAPL) $33.7 billion gross profit during the same period.

“Using a pricing scheme similar to iTunes, with 70 percent ($1.04) to the developer, $0.20 plus 2 percent of the ASP ($0.23) to the credit card company, and 1 percent ($0.02) per app for processing (storage & delivery), Apple’s App Store gross margin on revenue from paid apps ($428 million since launch) is about 44 percent, or $189 million in gross profit,” Munster explains. “This does not factor in the roughly $81 million Apple has spent since launch to store and deliver the 4 billion free apps that have been downloaded.”

So while App Store sales are through the roof, Apple is certainly not making a killing from them. But that’s never been the point, anyway. Like iTunes itself, the App Store’s purpose is to drive hardware sales. It’s a secondary business.

Said Munster: “We see a virtuous cycle of Apple’s robust app ecosystem adding features and functionality to the iOS devices, which drives sales, which makes the ecosystem more robust, which encourages more developers to write apps, and the cycle repeats itself.”

I’m not exactly sure why Viacom dug up YouTube’s profit-and-loss statement and balance sheet from its pre-Google days, but I’m glad it did. You can see the entire thing, which covers YouTube’s birth in the spring of 2005 through August 2006, at the bottom of this post.

But these excerpts give you a very good snapshot of what was going on in the company’s early days–hypergrowth, followed, eventually, by revenue (click to enlarge):

Some context: Chad Hurley registered the YouTube domain in February 2005, but the site wasn’t up and running for a few more months. Co-founder Jared Karim uploaded YouTube’s first video, “Me at the zoo,” in late April 2005.

By December 2005, users were uploading 6,000 clips a day, and the site was streaming 2.5 million videos a day. By February 2006, those numbers had jumped to 20,000 and 18 million, respectively. In July 2006, YouTube users uploaded 2.1 million clips and watched three billion of them.

Which explains the skyrocketing Web-hosting bills. But do note the burst of revenue from direct sales in August 2006, which allowed the company to generate a gross profit. A lot of people assumed that YouTube had to find a buyer like Google (GOOG) a few months later because it couldn’t pay its own bandwidth bills. But these numbers suggest that this may not be the case.

Also of note for Web video and Web ad nerds/historians: Check out the detailed breakdown of YouTube’s ad revenue and hosting costs, both real and projected, circa December 2005.

youtube pl

balance sheet