Twitter recently hit the big time, its initial public offering almost doubling days after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. Surely us users should be given a cut of the proceeds, after all, it’s our inane — yet thankfully brief — ramblings that made Twitter what it is today.
Yeah, no, the world doesn’t work like that.
But what if did?
TIME has put together a simple calculator that, provided with a user’s handle, will have a go at figuring out how much Twitter theoretically owes you, now that it’s worth billions of dollars.
Once provided a handle, you’ll get a breakdown of monies owed, the formula derived from the following information:
In its IPO paperwork filed to regulators last month, Twitter stated its 230 million active users are producing 500 million tweets per day, noting, “We deliver more than 200 billion Tweets per day to our users.”
Twitter appears to define a “delivered tweet” as any tweet seen by a follower of another user. If the 200 billion figure is to be believed, then each of the 500 million daily tweets is delivered to an average of 400 people.
A $24.9 billion value divided by 200 billion tweet deliveries a day comes out to 12.45 cents per daily eyeball on the site.
It goes on to say that only about 25 per cent of users pay attention to your tweets, according to “at least one study”, so as much as we like to think every tweet we make is gold and our followers have nothing better to do than wait for us to describe our daily ablutions in 140 characters or less… this isn’t actually the case.
So, hit up the link below, type in your username and see what’s not coming your way!