Tweets Hit 50 Million/Day; Where is the Money?

Twitter recently announced that its content volume has reached 50 million Tweets a day. But many in media are still trying to get a handle on how to best to measure Twitter's impact, let alone monetize the social media channel.

Case in point: CNN reported the other day that new research indicates that only 27 percent of Twitter users are "active," and made the following observation: "Twitter may be a fast-growing social network, but most of its 50 million accounts merely follow other users rather than posting their own messages."

Actually, there is nothing new about this, so I'm not sure how it qualified as "news." From the beginning, studies of the micro-blogging service have found that the great majority of users follow a relatively small number (the number I've seen most often is ten percent) do the bulk of the Tweeting.

Nevertheless, citing this kind of one-to-many model, some have gone so far as to label twitter a "dead-end technology." Consider French analyst Constantine von Hoffman:

"Twitter will eventually die because: It is of no interest to the next generation. (Instead of Twitter, the youth are all texting all the time.) [and] It can't generate revenue."

Maybe so, but industry sources indicate that many media companies remain quite intrigued by the combination of geo-targeted ads and real-time information that Twitter potentially offers them.

The New York Times, the Huffington Post, and the Austin-American Statesman are among those that have been experimenting with charging local advertisers for Tweets posted under their accounts. AdAge reports that Montreal-based publisher Canoe has ben testing a method to capitalize on Twitter-referred traffic via a service called Assetize that inserts an advertising bar on top of pages that get promoted on Twitter.

Management at Twitter is busy promoting their new location-based feature. "People who choose to add this additional layer of context help make Twitter a richer information network for all of us--location data can make Tweets more useful," says co-founder Biz Stone.

Meanwhile, the volume of Tweets generated by that relatively modest slice of the community that is active continues to grow, as the chart at the top of this post indicates. If achieving this kind of scale matters -- and many a startup's business plan claims it does -- we should start hearing the sound of K-ching! coming from Twitter before this year is out.

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