U.S. researchers say Twitter tweets and Facebook postings and the searches they generate may be worth as much as $30 million a day to advertisers and Web sites.
Researchers at Penn State University say results of Internet searches prompted by this ever-changing real-time activity is of immense value to Web search companies and companies that advertise on them.
"Real-time content is particularly interesting because it's a window into a person's world at a particular moment in time," Jim Jansen, associate professor of information sciences and technology, said. "What we wanted to determine is if real-time search could be monetized."
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, a university release reported Tuesday.
"This type of content typically occurs on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn and is usually temporal in nature," Jansen said. "It's immediate and tells people what's going on right now."
The researchers examined six months of real-time search queries, the words and phrases that people plug into search engines to find information.
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 million a day, or almost $10.9 billion a year, in revenue from those clicks.
Share This Article With Planet Earth
