Trump’s free media exposure worth billions

US Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump has received nearly $2.5 billion worth of free exposure on various platforms, media monitoring companies say.

According to SocialFlow, a social media optimization platform, the New York businessman is the most popular candidate on various social media networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

SocialFlow estimates that in March people have spent around 1.94 million hours reading Trump content shared on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

This is specially significant when compared to around 630 thousand hours people have spent reading content related to Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton.

“Donald Trump has demonstrated a showman’s ability to dominate the conversation," SocialFlow CEO Jim Anderson told Yahoo Finance on Thursday. "On social media he’s been able to generate billions of impressions, which translate into millions of hours of exposure."

On Trump’s visibility, Anderson noted that all those hours translate into real value, which means for Trump "the value over the course of a year is about $383 million."

"By comparison, Hillary Clinton, who does quite well with social media herself, is getting about $90 million worth of free exposure on social media," Anderson added.

This marks a significant change compared to a year ago, when according to SocialFlow, people spent around 64 thousand hours reading content about Clinton and around 3,500 hours about Trump.

SocialFlow noted that it was unclear how much of the content was negative or positive for the candidates, but if we stick to the rule “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” then the brash billionaire who keeps raising eyebrows with his outrageous remarks is getting the richest free publicity ride.

Another analysis by mediaQuant, published on Tuesday, has found that Trump has received nearly $2 billion in free media exposure this past year.

Trump received $1.9 billion in free, or "earned," media coverage this election cycle, and only spent $10 million on paid advertisements.

This is while Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Florida Senator Marco Rubio and Ohio Governor John Kasich have spent more, clocking in at $313 million, $204 million and $38 million in free media respectively.

But none of that has stopped has stopped Trump who is leading the GOP field by winning 673 out of the 1,237 delegates needed to represent his in the November election.

Cruz is a distant second with 411 and Kasich follows him with 143 delegates while Rubio dropped out of the race after losing his home-state to Trump.

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