[dylan604]

>> They make their money on the potenial eyeballs alone. Lurkers are not helping increase those numbers. >I don’t follow this.. Lurkers are they eyeballs presumably.

The number of eyeballs allows for the price per ad to increase while the number of places ads can be placed increase the volume of ads. If lurkers are not helping to increase the volume, it doesn't make the platform as much money. Proving the lurkers are actually consuming the ads and making the ad buyer happy is non-trivial. Proving the lurkers are worth increasing the price per ad is also non-trivial. In the end, I personally feel like it is a wash by lurkers being overly represented in the fake account numbers.

[jrockway]

Compare Twitter ads to the ads in a newspaper or something. 100% of a newspaper's readers are lurkers, but ads still seem to be worth more than $0.

[thebean11]

Volume of ads is irrelevant. An additional tweet to attach an ad to does not generate revenue if there is nobody looking at it. On the other hand, though, an additional set of eyeballs on an existing monetized tweet does generate additional revenue.

As an extreme example, a single monetized tweet with a billion viewers generates money. A billion monetized tweet with one viewer obviously does not..