2 Cent Tweets Anyone?

Given some estimates about Twitter's value of $250M [1],[2],[3], and that its current usage stats are 3M tweets per day, one cannot but wonder what's the cost-per-tweet? Suppose that it takes 10% of Twitter's value to keep the LEDs on Twitter's servers blinking (i.e. all operational costs are around $25M/year), and we consider the number of tweets per day is its currency,

$25M/year = approximately $2M/month = $200K/3 / day (1 month = 30 days)

At 3M tweets/day,

$200K/3 ~ 3M tweets

therefore,

1 tweet = 2.222... cents

So, would you pay 2 cents for every tweet you send? Alternatively, if you were an advertiser, or a sponsor, would you pay the 2 cents required by your "followees" to keep their tweets flowing?

Take the poll on the right.

Remarks: Obviously, if just the number of tweets/day continue to grow, the cost per tweet will decrease. However, I'm assuming that Twitter's operating cost will increase with the number of tweets/day. Whether it's going to be a 1:1 ratio, that's up for debate.

-Igor Sales

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[1] http://www.web-strategist.com/blog/2009/01/25/twitters-valuation-7352-an-active-user/

[2] http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/24/twitter-raising-new-cash-at-250-million-valuation/

[3] http://www.swampfox.ws/2009/01/26/twitter-valued-250m )