• BusinessWeek, Thursday, January 7, 2010 3:13 PM

BusinessWeek does a little arithmetic and deduces that Google and Microsoft are paying Twitter roughly 3¢ for every 1,000 tweets they crawl -- "a pittance in the world of online advertising." Indeed, top media sites often get $10 or $20 per thousand page views, while remnant inventory -- leftover Web pages that get sold through ad networks -- goes for 50¢ to $1 per thousand.

The independent deals, reached late last year between Twitter and the search engines, were together worth $25 million, yet put "almost no value" on Twitter's data, according to Donnovan Andrews, vice-president of strategic development for the digital marketing agency Tribal Fusion. As BusinessWeek points out, no one has figured out how to make real money off of tweets yet, but Google and Microsoft are actually betting on all that changing.

Read the whole story at BusinessWeek »