• Ad Age, Tuesday, July 21, 2009 1:45 PM

What is Twitter's ubiquitous media coverage worth? According to VMS, a news-monitoring agency, Twitter coverage over the last 30 days is worth around $48 million. Ad Age's Abbey Klaassen points out that that's nearly half of what Microsoft plans to spend on marketing for its new search engine, Bing. Twitter received exactly 2.73 billion impressions in the past month-and this doesn't include the huge bounce the microblogging service received in April when celebrities like Oprah and Ellen started tweeting. According to the report, TV contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%.

VMS CEO Peter Wengryn said the total PR value of Twitter coverage over the past 30 days could be as much as double the figure VMS cites, given that the company doesn't measure mentions in smaller newspapers around the country. "This is huge. It's very, very high," said Gary Getto, VP-integrated media intelligence at VMS. "In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google." By contrast, the estimated media value of the coverage given to Microsoft's Bing was just $573,834, with a reach of just 63 million impressions.

According to Nielsen Online, Twitter had 21 million unique visitors in June, which is 14% higher than its May traffic. As Klaassen notes, Twitter's 7% growth in May represents a serious slowdown from the furious pace it grew between January and April. "Twitter does seem to have more sizzle in the press than it does in real life," she says.

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