Media companies are getting ready to follow celebrities like Kim Kardashian in monetizing their large Twitter followings. As reported in Ad Age, Twitter prospector Ad.ly is leading the way in launching a service for inserting paid Tweets into threads with a large following. Kardashian has been among the first to take advantage, offering a going rate of $10,000 per Tweet sent to her monstrous 2.8 million strong Twitter following. Media giants with their own impressive audiences, such as the NY Times and its 2.3 million followers, are treading more carefully. The Times advertising chief Denise Warren says the paper has a wait-and-see attitude about Twitter readers’ ability to decipher paid messages from genuine communication. In the meantime the company is exploring other ways of leveraging its social media following including ads targeted to visitors who come to the paper s web site through Twitter. Ad Age says Ad.ly is moving forward with its plan and modeling out paid Tweets. As with Kardashian s pricing model, Ad.ly’s going rate is about $1-3 per one thousand Twitter followers. It also plans to introduce an algorithm this month to measure the quality of Twitter feeds such as number of re-Tweets and how much advertising it attracts. Read more at Ad Age.