Have you noticed how often Twitter gets mentioned on the news, TV shows, in the movies, in newspapers? Well, all that buzz can be converted into cold hard cash, and if you look at it that way, Twitter is already filthy rich.
News monitoring service VMS estimates that Twitter's mentions in the media were worth $48 million over the past 30 days. That's about 80 times more than Bing got in the last 30 days ($573,834); in fact, that's more than Google gets, and Google is a verb, used everywhere on a daily basis.
The numbers are even more impressive if you look at impressions (when a person sees a mention of Twitter on Oprah, for example, that's one impression) - Twitter received 2.73 billion impressions in the past month, and that doesn't take into account numerous mentions in smaller newspapers around the country.
Since the Twitter buzz has been going on for months now, simple math shows that if Twitter were to spend money on all that free advertising it's getting, it would have spent hundreds of millions of dollars by now.
The folks at VMS aren't sure if Twitter can maintain this level of media buzz much longer. Frankly, it's obvious it cannot: once it stops growing - and that will happen one day, it'll either become so ubiquitous that media outlets will feel less need to mention it on a daily basis, or (a much worse scenario) slowly start sinking into oblivion.