• TechCrunch, Friday, March 13, 2009 12 PM

When new users sign up to Twitter these days, they are given a list of 100 suggested users to start following. Being on that list can nab you well over 100,000 followers, and TechCrunch notes that several people and organizations on that list already have more than 250,000 followers each. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis, who is speaking later this month at MediaPost's OMMA Global Hollywood conference and expo in Los Angeles, thinks that being one of the top 20 on the suggested list could be worth as much as a Superbowl ad within five years.

Accordingly, Calacanis, who has 61,266 followers on Twitter, is offering the startup $250,000 to lock in a spot on the suggested list for two years, or $120,000 for one year. In an email response to TechCrunch, Calacanis writes that he is "100% dead serious" about this. "I'm thinking of sending the check today anyway...if it sits on their desk they might just cash it."

Has Jason Calacanis just found Twitter a business model? Obviously, he thinks being on Twitter's suggested list is a great marketing opportunity for him and his various endeavors. As TC writer Erick Schonfeld notes, it's not unusual for people on the suggested list to gain 10,000 new followers per day, which amounts to 3.6 million a year. "Those are customers who feel a connection with you because of the personal nature of Twitter messages," he says. Indeed, selling these slots at $120,000 a pop could net Twitter $2.4 million in revenues this year.

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