Apple Thoughts - News & Reviews on all things Apple

"Apple's clearly onto something with its 24-hour store plopped down in a tourist hot spot. The New York Post reports that as of sometime last year, Apple was pulling down $440 million a year in sales at its Fifth Avenue Apple Store in New York City. The numbers surfaced in the paper's investigation of empty retail space along Fifth Avenue."

When you are one of the most photographed landmarks in the world, it's no surprise that you will generate the foot traffic and the dollars they bring to the location. But $440 million USD in sales is still an impressive number, even in good economic times. In comparison, according to the New York Post article, the SoHo store brings in about $100 million USD per year and they expect the new Santa Barbara store to bring in about $20 million USD. Quite a difference in revenue. The total sales figures for the 252 stores in the Apple chain this past quarter were roughly $1.87 Billion USD, a few reasons why they aren't putting a halt on the building of new stores I suppose.

"Among the 175 most-photographed landmarks on earth, Apple's Fifth Avenue (NYC) store has risen to fame the quickest, beating out Wrigley Field (Chicago), Buckingham Palace (London) and even the White House (DC). According to researchers from Cornell University who studied over 33.3 million Flickr photographs, the iconic glass cube of the Fifth Avenue store was the fifth most-photographed landmark in New York City, which is the world's most-photographed city"

Interesting study but it is a pretty dry read. But if you are interested, they have published the results of the study as well as the photo mapping they used to complete the study. They used something called "mean-shift clustering" to get the top seven most photographed landmarks on Earth, as well as the top seven in each of the top 25 metropolitan areas. I don't exactly know what "mean-shift clustering" is but they fully explain it in the report they presented at a Web conference in Spain last week. New York city was the most distinctive tag they found, and the top five landmarks worldwide were, in order, Eiffel Tower, Trafalgar Square, Tate Modern art museum in London, Big Ben and Notre Dame. In case you are curious, the Apple Store on 5th Avenue was number 5 on the list under New York City landmarks. The top 4 were, in order, Empire State Building, Times Square, Rockefeller Plaza and Grand Central Station.