The ongoing evolution of the Web 2.0 framework continues to change the way marketing and publicity work in the new digital world. Everyone knows that the groundswell of awareness that services like Facebook, Twitter and other peer to peer networks can marshal has to be worth something, but the question is, what, exactly? The quest to figure this out has lead to a number of social networking analysis services. One of these services, Virtue, has just come up with an answer: $3.60 each.

How they arrived at that number is the subject of the link at the bottom of the page, but a quick review of what they mean seems warranted. Virtue tracked the number of wall posts for brands whose Facebook fan pages they manage. These brands had a grand total of over 45 million individuals as fans. By averaging revenues from their client’s fans, Virtue found that, on average, over the 45 million users, each fan was worth around $3.60 in advertising revenue.