New research out of Yahoo shows that the top 20,000 Twitter users get 50% of the tweet impressions (the number of people who see each individual tweet). Since Twitter has about 200 million users, that means 0.01% of Twitter users have 50% of the tweet wealth (yes, I just made up that term).
Now compare this to income inequality in the U.S. where the top 1% control 42.7% of the financial wealth.
That means that Tweet wealth is over 100x more concentrated than financial wealth. That is staggering.
I don't know exactly what this means yet, but in a world where attention increasingly matters more than money, we've got a very big problem.
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TinyVox: Tape&Tweet commented
2011-09-28 17:45:10 -0700
Visualize a “twitter Communism” where each user got exactly the same amount of “wealth”… an interesting seed for a spec: an inverse Twitter ? Andy Warhol specified something never built, that everyone gets a 15 minute video… sounds a bit like about.me ?
Bill Seitz commented
2011-09-28 16:49:57 -0700
Don’t get me started on pocket-lint inequality.
John Philpin commented
2011-07-28 16:40:22 -0700
#TweetWealth – I feel a petition coming on …. I am guessing that part of the problem here is that MOST people in the twitter sphere are sitters, lurkers, non engagers to begin with – and when they do – will be around those ‘brands’ that sit there with the gazillions of followers they have
@ntea
tweeted
link to this page.
2011-04-22 21:47:39 -0700
A fascinating fact just inspired me to take up Twitter http://lb.cm/ZCC
@MyrnaTheMinx
mentioned @
link to this page.
2011-03-26 18:28:21 -0700
RT @jgilliam: tweet inequality is the new income inequality; http://bit.ly/dJJGuC
