You Are The Next Big Moneymaker

The web has changed the world in momentous ways. Every time I log onto Facebook or some other social website, I'm amazed by the amount of traffic and interaction. We, in radio and other traditional media have taken notice of these new ways to communicate. Some of us (yours truly) have been geeking out for years, but look at the financial facts:

"All of those Twitter tweets and Facebook friends may have value after all, according to Penn State researchers. Updates on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and other real-time content sites could be worth more than $30 million a day, or nearly $10.9 billion a year to advertisers, according to Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology. Jansen defines real-time content as messages – usually about the size of a typical English sentence – and links to other forms of content that people post to social networks and online sites. Real-time search engines present a stream of this content based on keywords entered by users. Researchers examined six months of real-time search queries and, after separating duplicate searches to find unique search terms, determined the value of the real-time search terms by using Google Adwords Traffic Estimator. Of the 1,005,296 total queries, researchers determined that 297,392, or 30%, were unique queries. Approximately 52% of the unique searches had economic value. If the searches were presented on a Google search results page, the researchers estimated people would click the resulting ads generated by the search more than 6.4 million times a day and generate approximately $33,023,320 in revenue from those clicks."

WOW! Look how valuable "you've" become as the ultimate consumer, just by being active at what you love to do.