A Twitter business model - selling audiences?

The L A Times pointed to something I also noticed today when I set up a friend's account:

Some high-profile Twitter accounts have been seeing astronomical jumps in the number of users subscribing to their profile updates -- tens of thousands of new followers, in some cases.

A feature launched last month, called "suggested users," contributed to the spike, explained Evan Williams, Twitter's co-founder and chief executive.

As part of the sign-up process, new users are now shown a sort-of featured personalities list that includes a wide variety of popular people and companies. Included are U.K. newspaper The Guardian's technology page, Web personality Felicia Day, TechCrunch, actor Rainn Wilson, computer maker Dell, grocer Whole Foods, the New York Times and CNN.

Since Twitter began endorsing a handful of personalities in mid-January, The Guardian was among several entities to reap a subscriber windfall. Its account jumped from about 4,000 followers to 66,000 in about a month, according to stat-tracking service Twitter Counter. And within the last two weeks, @GuardianTech added new users at a pace about 300% faster than the previous two weeks.

My first thought when I saw the very limited set of suggested follows was "I wonder how they decide who goes in there?" - it is prime value real estate. My second was "I wonder if those people are paying for presence?" and my third was "if they aren't, they could be - Twitter could make money out of this!"

The other thought was that it was a pretty scattergun, with a few questions added you could show a more relevant group of people.