And then there’s Twitter, which jealously guards access to its full stream of tweets (roughly 1,000 per second, these days). As of now, however, it’s signed a deal with Gnip whereby you can get a randomly-selected 50% of those tweets for $360,000 a year, which works out at $30,000 a month. You’re not allowed to republish them, but that’s OK—the people willing to spend that kind of money are likely to be high-frequency trading shops who want to keep the data as private as possible in any case.

I had to look up what a high-frequency trading shop was. Basically, they use lots and lots of data to trade on tiny tiny margins. I had no idea the dataset of tweets could help in that process.

But it’s not too surprising, I guess, considering that tweets can predict movie box office returns better than anything else. There’s a lot of data there.