By Edmund Lee Published: April 14, 2010 NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Stop paying Kim Kardashian $10,000 per tweet. That's the recommendation based on the work of Yahoo's principal research scientist Duncan Watts, who presented his findings at Advertising Age's Digital Conference today. "If I had a fixed budget, I could get more value from a small amount of very influential [influencers], or a lot of smaller influencers, on Twitter," Mr. Watts said. "If you recruit enough people who, on average, influence just one other person, you could get a much better return on investment if you aggregated them and altogether paid them a tenth of what Kardashian gets." It's timely research given Twitter's deployment of its business model yesterday, though Mr. Watts was clear his numbers were largely hypothetical. "I'm assuming a lot of things in this model," he explained, "but it's a good way of seeing what influencers on Twitter might be worth." The insights grew out of Mr. Watts' larger work on social media, including an updated version of Stanley Milgram's famous test of the "Small World Problem." In the original test, Mr. Milgram concluded that, on average, two random individuals are separated by only six degrees of connections. Mr. Watts used e-mail instead of the postal service to test the theory, which led to a slightly higher number: eight. But perhaps more enticingly, Mr. Watts also looked at a problem every marketer (and publisher) is currently trying to solve: How do you influence people online? Read the full article on Ad Age at http://adage.com/digiconf10/article?article_id=143301.