“Buying” followers on Twitter? What’s the CPM?
This article about Jason Calacanis offering to “sponsor” a position on the twitter new user page has tons of numbers to make my mouth water. In short, Jason offers $250K for a two-year slot on the page of suggested users to follow for new twitter users. The belief is that new twitter users want to follow people (other wise a blank twitter page is pretty boring). If you get a position on this page of suggested twitter users, you are bound to get some clickthrus.
TechCrunch suggests that one can get 10,000 new followers every day from being listed on this suggestion list which adds up to 3.6 million in a year. No idea whether they can support this claim. Other famous people/entities on this list (e.g. Al Gore, Lance Armstrong, Kevin Rose, etc.) have only 250,000 followers.
To keep the math simple, I’ll use 1.0 million followers. This is less than the 365 times 10,000 suggested by TechCrunch but 4x that of actual and popular twitter users. One needs to tweet regularly but not too much to keep the followers. Let’s say it is 5 tweets a day times 365 days a year. So, for a cool $250K, you get to “touch” each of your followers 3,650 times over two years.
The CPM works out to be $250,000 / (3650 * 1,000,000 / 1000) = $0.068
Assuming that you can really amass a million followers, this is not a good deal, it is a great deal! Even if you only get a quarter of followers like the 250K followers of NYTimes and CNN, the CPM is still around $0.25, the range of many social media.
