Last but not least: What does Twitter owe me?
Twitter's IPO is a windfall. But how much do individual Twitter feeds contribute to that? An online calculator provides the answer.
Following the successful IPO of the short message service Twitter last week, more and more tweet-loving contemporaries are asking themselves what share they have in this windfall with their published messages. The American news magazine Time has therefore published a Simple form to calculate the value of public Twitter feeds. This takes into account the number of published tweets, the number of followers and the time since which tweets have been posted. These figures are then offset against information from the prospectus for the IPO.
We learn that the leader of the free world, President Barack Obama, would be worth 5.2 million dollars. However, this is nothing compared to teen pop star Justin Bieber, whose incessant tweeting would be worth 21.2 million dollars. Of course, the Twitter bosses do not intend to compensate their users for their creative work. There are two ways of looking at this: Does someone write a clever sentence every day for five years and then someone else comes along and publishes these fruits of creative labor and makes a killing - should the author get something out of it or not? Or is it more like e-mails and the Internet provider: If someone writes a lot of e-mails to a lot of recipients, no one would dream of asking the telecom provider for money. It doesn't matter, because according to the Time calculator, tweeting luminaries from the Swiss media world would only get away with peanuts anyway.
Christoph J. Walther























