[daveying99]

They do, and the price is $0.0001 per tweet.

Search rate limits through the normal API can be prohibitive for many use cases like news/brand monitoring. Or even citizen monitoring programs for local police. So they resort to datasift and gnip and are charged volume-based amounts on behalf of Twitter. And presumably, at the end of every month, a wire transfer goes out to Twitter.

Now that doesn't mean that twitter makes $1 per 10,000 tweets. A license to the tweet is required separately for each end user of those two platforms. So with 1000 datasift users accessing a particular tweet, Twitter is making $0.10 on it. The more people request that tweet the more money Twitter makes. Marginal cost = 0.

For more info, check out the Datasift FAQ's: http://dev.datasift.com/docs/getting-started/billingfaq#lice...