Really shaky logic, taking the price that a premium network is charging and the price for cheap adverts and getting the average. I'd be very surprised if TwitPic's average rate is even close to $3, more likely ~$0.50.
Did I miss something or do they not count the expenses for TwitPic?
If they only get $10,000 for 3,2 millions views it seems almost likely that they're losing money, not making it...
Edit: A quick calculation tells me the expenses are actually quite negligible. The picture is 174kb * 3,2m servings * $0.03/GB for amazon cloudfront traffic (which I think they're using) means it's only cost them 16 bucks.
Also using data in the article, it says TwitPic gets between 3 and 4 million visitors overall per day. Accepting all of the same assumptions they use for Sheen's figures, that works out at about $10,000 per day.
At 70% profit margin, that's a business turning over $3.65M per annum, and profit / margin of just over $2.5M.
Which I've just realised matches neatly with the figures in paragraph 4.
Have any celebs tried to get themselves into a 'send me a free copy of your product, and I will tweet about it' gig? Seems like a golden opportunity to get tons of stuff (and good advertising for the companies obviously. Except not technically advertising )
It is advertising, and as such you're required to disclose any products you blog about that you received for free.
There are many celebs who do this, though most are just randomly sent free stuff rather than asking for it. The exception might be actresses who need an Oscars dress or something, but usually boxes of stuff just show up every day and mostly get thrown out.
My understanding is that this rate is only for peak hours, and only if she doesn't tweet anything else for an hour afterwards. So even at those ridulous rates there are probably many days when it doesn't make sense to do it.
