Twitter Generates $48 Million of Media Coverage in a Month

Twitter's been the toast of TV news programs, daytime talk shows, magazine editors and newspaper reporters. But what's all that chatter worth? According to news-monitoring service VMS, a cool $48 million over the past 30 days. (That's half of what Microsoft plans to spend marketing its biggest product launch of the year, Bing.) Twitter received almost 3 billion impressions -- 2.73 billion, to be exact -- in the past month, a time period that doesn't even include the frenzied weeks in April in which Oprah and Ellen weighed in on the micro-blogging service. TV contributed to 57% of the PR value, newspapers 37% and magazines 5%. Incidentally, Fox News bested CNN in terms of total PR value delivered by its Twitter mentions, although CNN dropped the name more often. In reality, said VMS CEO Peter Wengryn, the number of impressions over the past 30 days could be as much as double that, considering the company doesn't measure mentions in all the smaller newspapers around the country.