A few hours after we spoke with Sean Rad, CEO of “in-stream” advertising company Ad.ly on the PRNewser Weekly Podcast this morning, a Yahoo scientist blasted what may be the company’s biggest money maker — Kim Kardashian — at the Advertising Age Digital Conference just a few blocks away.

Yahoo’s principal research scientist Duncan Watts told the conference:

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…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.

As PRNewser previously reported, Kardashian can command up to $10,000 per tweet from advertisers looking to get in front of her almost three million followers.