Let’s talk twitter for a second, and how it actually devalues you, and your precious content everyone is so concerned about getting in realtime.

Twitter has around 25 million active users.

Now we know that everyone loves twitter and is on it a lot, but for discussions sake let’s say the average user spends 2 minutes a day on twitter or 1 hour a month.

25 million users a month x 1hr. month = 300 million hours a year.

We are very concerned about this data. We create it, we want it in realtime, for it to be secure all that stuff, but we can’t download it though. There is obviously a value to this data as demonstrated by our concerns for it and twitters protection and sales of it which brings us to the next part of the equation.

What is an hour of your time and writings worth?

Now let’s forget for a second that you are a highly compensated social media expert who’s time and wisdom is worth at least $300hr. Let’s just say you are a regular blogger or work in a Starbucks and you only make $10hr. We’ll use that number.

$10hr. x 300 million user hours for a year = $3 BILLION DOLLARS in brain power and time.

So based on very conservative data the collective intellectual value of twitter as generated by it’s users is $3 Billion dollars per year.

Twitter recently announced that it did deals with Bing and Google for $25 million dollars for your tweets.

That means twitter just sold your work, and their data for pennies on the dollar. Twitter just shaved $2,975,000,000 off the value of the collective work of their community.

So here’s the final value of your time and work according to twitter.

$0.08 per hour.

$25MM ÷ 300MM user hours = $0.0833333333 per user per hour.

So now that google and MS have the data for $0.08 per user they will be able to see first hand that twitter does not have nearly the activity or users everyone thinks they have, they will see all the bots and a few users who generate most of the nonsense. They will see that they overpaid even at $0.8 cents per user.

So do you still think your precious tweets and realtime news data from morons is valuable? Because no one else does. Especially bing, google and twitter.