Your attention is worth USD .34 and for sale

posted 05:41PM Apr 13, 2008 with tags attention ebay socialnetworking twitter by Lars Trieloff

Andrew Baron, founder of Rocketboom is selling his Twitter account on eBay. With the current bid of 510 USD, each of his 1481 followers is worth .34 USD to the buyer. That is little more than you would pay for a click in Google Ads, which bears some interesting implications for everbody interested in monetizing Twitter attention at a large scale (e.g. Twitter). So if you would find a way of grabbing the attention of all twitter users (TwitDir tracks almost a million twitter users), this collective attention would be worth 330435 USD, which is much less than the 21 million valuation estimated by Techcrunch.

Turning the calculation around, and taking this 21.88 USD per user valuation, however Andrew Baron's account would be worth 32411 USD.