How Much is a Twitter Account Worth? The Recount Up For Sale Says Mysterious Source Who Definitely Isn’t Trying To Drum Up Interest

A major part of any modern media operation is social media. That is especially the case for any media brand that caters to other media, to journalists and pundits and “personalities” in the business of The Media. And no brand caters more just to journalists than The Recount.

Actually, I should say caters to journalists on Twitter. Or rather, caters to them using the journalists’ own content. Wait, make that liberal journalists.

No brand caters to the liberal media on Twitter with their own content more than The Recount.

Because that is the essential value proposition, such as it is. It’s a social media-based brand that shares video clips featuring mainly members of media, or is about or of interest to the mainstream liberal media, that are frequently re-shared by that media, with Twitter as the primary platform — it being the navel upon which the media’s gaze is most obsessively fixed.

And they are for sale, CNN’s Reliable Sources newsletter reported “First” this week.

First in Reliable: The Recount Explores Sale: The digital outlet The Recount is exploring a sale, a person with knowledge of the matter told me Tuesday. The three-and-a-half-year-old outlet, founded by John Heilemann and John Battelle, which saturates social media platforms like Twitter with short politics-focused videos, believes a sale to an established entity might help provide it with greater resources and a larger audience, the person said. The company is in talks with potential partners or acquirers, the person added, noting that the conversations are “active and ongoing.”

News networks, newspapers, news websites, and partisan media all rely heavily social media to get the brand out there, to drum up clicks and ratings, to create buzz — you know, all the hot keywords.

Twitter, which has an outsize role within and among those in media and journalism compared to average news consumer, is exceptionally central to those strategies. And so on Twitter you see accounts with very high engagement that focus on sharing that content, and a high density of tweets from media outlets that contain, well, media. As in pictures and video. It’s an important way to promote one’s content.

Or to promote someone else’s content, which is what The Recount does fairly effectively.

It’s not exclusively sharing things said in or by the press, there are a fair number tweets that show clips of politicians accompanied by snarky commentary, for example. You know, unique stuff.

But even where the clips are not focused on centering journalists, they are shared by and used by them extensively. Not to mention by Democrats both elected or running, by big liberal, or far-left Twitter accounts.

Another outfit that does that is Aaron Rupar. Or, from the other side, Greg Price. But as far as we know at least one of those individuals is not for sale.

But the Recount might be. Or they’re “exploring” it.

What does “exploring a sale” mean, in this context? Well I’m not a “person with knowledge of the matter” and I didn’t ask anyone who is, but if I were to take a wild stab in the dark I would define “exploring” as “telling CNN’s Reliable Sources that we are for sale and are sure hoping someone will express interest.”

That’s just a guess, though. The point is that The Recount, which as a public product consists of their social media passwords and the website and app where they aggregate their social media posts, is available kind of for sale. Also there are podcasts maybe, idk. Memes? I mean you don’t see memes and videos on social media just any old day of the week, you know? Oh wait…

Hey don’t get my tone wrong, I love The Recount. I watch their clips on Twitter. Well … the clips they share. It’s very inexpensive to do. Free, in fact.

I too love getting good Twitter engagement, and video does tend to get that. It’s important if you work in media. Especially if your job in media is catering to the rest of the media via social media. And I do write at Mediaite, where we write about media and sometimes bash media and sometimes seek to make clips go viral and sometimes with other people’s content.

So I’m not bashing The Recount, which is almost media. I’m just noting that they are exploring a sale but I can’t quite pinpoint why anyone would want to pay actual money for it. Maybe because they are doing “path-breaking work,” according to a quote in that email.

I hate paths, so that’s good too. I’m a trail man, honestly.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.