Twitter is undoubtedly the social networking darling of the tech and increasingly the mainstream media, going from a relatively obscure service, catering to the tech-inclined, to mainstream awareness in as little as three months. And this without spending a dime, something few companies can boast. But what if it had, how much would all the media coverage set it back? Almost $50 million per month if numbers from news-monitoring service VMS are to be believed.

The report cited by AdvertisingAge shows Twitter getting 2.73 impressions in the last month, not one of the best for the microblogging service, with bigger coverage coming from Oprah and the Ashton Kutcher versus CNN race to 1 million followers from the previous months. VMS accounts TV with 57 percent of the PR value, followed by newspapers with 37 percent and magazines with 5 percent.

In fact, the numbers could be a lot bigger, even double, VMS CEO Peter Wengryn believes, as the company doesn't take into account smaller news outlets in the US or any intentional media. But even with these conservative measurements it is still getting a lot more coverage than any other IT company. "This is huge. It's very, very high," Gary Getto, VP of integrated media intelligence at VMS, said. "In fact, we looked at online coverage of Twitter vs. Google. Twitter is running significantly higher than Google and I didn't think anything was more popular than Google."

Twitter has been growing at a blistering pace since March tripling its users in the US alone though growth has been slowing down in the past two months. It's unclear whether the company will be able to retain its appeal in the media for long and in fact Twitter executives are cautious about the overexposure. Still, considering that Microsoft has a reported marketing budget of $80 to $100 million for its new search engine Bing but has only managed to get $573 thousand worth of free media coverage it can't be all that bad for Twitter.