The cost of advertising on Twitter has increased roughly five-fold since the social-microblog-whatchamacallit service started offering "promoted trends" a little over a year ago.
In an interview with the marketing site Clickz published this week, Twitter director of revenue Adam Bain says the cost of a promoted trend is now $120,000 per day, up from $25,000-$30,000 when Twitter launched the service in April 2010. Bain says over that time, Twitter has worked with more than 600 advertisers on more than 6,000 campaigns. That's decent growth for an ad service that launched with just 6 clients.
Big-name clients include the likes of Virgin, HBO, Samsung, JetBlue, and others. In addition to promoted trend slots, which appear on the right side of any Twitter user's home page, Twitter also offers promoted accounts and promoted tweets, but those are sold through an auction system, and--in the past at least--use a pay-per-click or pay-per-follow system. Recently, Bain says, Twitter has started asking for advertisers to spend a minimum of $15,000 over a three-month period.
If Twitter managed to get at least that $15,000 for each of its 6,000 campaigns (and to be clear, no one says they have, but humor me), that's a cool $90 million, or enough to buy at least two more Tweetdecks. Add in revenue from promoted trends and take into account some of Twitter's deep-pocketed, top-tier advertisers, and there's probably plenty more where that's coming from, and maybe even enough to buy stock in Facebook when it finally goes public.