CTV Advertising Strategies:

Insights from CTV leaders at Dentsu, Horizon Media and more

SECURE YOUR SEAT

What’s a Twitter Follower Worth?

There was a time when everyone wanted to know what a Facebook fan was worth. Estimates varied, and, of course, it depended on many factors. Much of this was losing the forest for the trees, but Facebook encouraged this by pretty much selling fans in its earliest ad products.

With Twitter becoming a major platform, and devoted to being a media company at the same time, the question arises what a Twitter follower is worth. It looks like the number is $2.50, at least for me. Twitter sent me an “invite” to advertise myself to new followers and recommended I pay up to $2.50 per new follower.

Is that steep? There are, of course, arguments on both sides. The pros would say that a Twitter follower is a persistent connection. The lifetime value of this, or at least until the follower decides she’s had enough of your blather, is quite high. The con is pretty simple and troubling: Twitter is renting you this follower.

My personal account aside, as a media business, Digiday wants to get new followers and fans and email subscribers. But there’s no question which connection I’d rather have with our audience: email. With email, we own the data, not Twitter or Facebook. Facebook’s struggles with brands come down to this: They’re not selling connections, they’re renting them. And it’s better to own than rent over the long term. A year ago, I asked marketing execs from MTV and Virgin which they’d rather have, if they could choose one way for a consumer connection: Twitter, Facebook or email. Both said email.

Platforms face many challenges, but this one is paramount for Twitter and Facebook. Brands won’t want to pony up big money for connections that are often fleeting and that don’t give them control. Otherwise it’s impossible to attach a lifetime value to a Twitter follower or Facebook fan. Platforms may want to play landlord, but they’re going to have unhappy tenants.

Image via Shutterstock.

https://digiday.com/?p=18758

More in Media

Digiday+ Research: Publishers pull back their dependence on digital revenue

After a year in which publishers shifted their revenue dependence away from traditional channels and toward digital channels, 2025 has seen a shift back toward more of a balance between traditional and digital revenue sources.

LinkedIn makes it easier for creators to track performance across platforms

Creator data is becoming more accessible to third-party vendors via a new API — another step in LinkedIn’s creator platform evolution.

Ad Tech Briefing: The ‘plumbers’ posing as the unlikely saviors of the internet

After several false dawns, can Cloudflare’s ‘anti-AI scraping tool’ finally offer publishers a road to commercial redemption?