Value of a Twitter Follower? Tuppence

An opportunity to understand the economics of online influence - Mashable:

Virgin America has partnered with Klout, an analytics service that tracks users’ influence on Twitter (based on variables such as the quality and number of followers and retweets), to extend free flights (plus tax) to influencers in Toronto.

The offer includes free round-trip airfare (Wi-Fi included) between Toronto and San Francisco (SFO) or Los Angeles (LAX) between June 23 and August 23. Those who received invitations for the offer — whether or not they decide to accept the flight that comes with it — were also invited to Virgin America’s Toronto Launch Event on June 29.

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We spoke with one person who received (and plans to accept) the offer — Breanna Hughes, a dating blogger and Product Manager at Artez Interactive in Toronto. Hughes has nearly 3,000 followers and a Klout score of 42 on a scale of 100. She kindly shared a snapshot of her Klout profile and the offer e-mail, which we’ve posted below.

A quick look at expedia show that a return flight from Toronto to San Farncisco in the period is betwee £500 and $600, and if we use Breanna Hughes' 3000 followers thats about $0.17 to $0.2 per follower.

Of course, that is the market value - the cost of filling those seats, assuming as I do that they are probably empty otherwise, allows two observations:

(i) Firstly, the actual cost to the supplier is minimal - those planes are flying anyway so the marginal cost of a blogger bum on an otherwise empty seat is a fraction of theticket value - say 20% tops for all direct costs incurred - so its about $0.034 to $0.04 per follower. Lets assume that Breanna is at the low end of the folllower count and she is 80% of the mean, this allows us to assume its about $0.025 per follower - about half a nickel in US speak, about two pence (tuppence) in UK speak

(ii) Secondly, this is the way influencers will be rewarded in the short term - bartering between a dubious metric (Klout's "influence" metric is one of many and its impossible to tell who is right at the moment) and people who have surplus assets that have alarge arbitrage between face value and marginal cost.

Now, what I don't know is how many jollies per annum Breanna will be offered, lets assume one a month, so that follower value rises by about an order of magnitude - about a dime in US speak, or 20p in Uk terms