$250,000 to be a suggested Twitter user
Posted by Brian Wong on Mar 12, 2009, under AerInterest
Jason Calacanis (founder of Weblogs, Inc., Mahalo) caused quite a stir today when he offered a serious sum of money to Twitter to be listed on the “suggested users” list on Twitter. A little bit of background: the suggested users list has catapulted people like Britney Spears and Kevin Rose to 250,000+ followers. I can understand Jason’s offer and his frustration as well – this user list has been seemingly arbitrarily put together and has converted to a phenomenal amount of followers for the people in question. There is immense value in a massive list of followers that are genuinely interested in following you and your updates – for example, let’s say that 10% of your followers list will view your link or view your message details – that’s almost 25,000 people at that instant. And that’s not counting retweets, social bookmarking, and digg referrals.
This 10% number is not out of thin air, however. I measure the clicks on the links that I tweet out through Hootsuite every so often. Out of the 160 followers that I have, on average – I usually receive 25-30 click throughs. Assuming that some of these clicks might ahve been for fun, a 10% rate is a conservative amount that could maybe be applied to other users and the nature of their followers. No one’s saying that it can’t be higher, however.
This has also serious implications about a potential revenue stream for Twitter. If people or even companies are willing to pay to be on this list – maybe, just maybe, there can be a sponsored users list. I’m jumping to naming this list the “sponsored” users list, because once the online community realizes that this list has been tainted with users that are paying themselves in, the genuine suggestive nature of the list can be seriously compromised.
Link: The amount and value of Twitter traffic
