Companies can’t run ads on Twitter (yet), but in five years, a prime spot on the micro-blogging service’s “suggested users” list might be worth well over a million dollars. That’s what Mahalo founder Jason Calacanis told TechCrunch, after offering Twitter’s founders $250,000 to secure a place on the list for the next two years. The list is a new feature that’s presented to people when they sign up for a Twitter account. Being on it can send some accounts upwards of 10,000 followers per day, a gift that Dave Winer agrees “might be worth a lot of money.” But which kinds of companies stand to gain the most from those followers?

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Not advertisers on the hunt for direct sales. According to Hitwise, less than one out of every 10 Twitter users heads to a retail or shopping site, so it’s not yet an effective direct response channel. The same goes for business and finance-related sites. For those kinds of advertisers, search and email are still much better sources of traffic. What Twitter excels at is driving traffic to entertainment sites like YouTube, as one out of five of its users heads to an entertainment site after visiting Twitter.com—a trend that media and entertainment companies might want to pay attention to. 

More after the jump.