This year, Bluesky has grown very quickly thanks to a lively community of posters, the ability for users to make their own changes, and a decentralized system that doesn’t force users to follow the decisions of a billionaire CEO. But one thing that isn’t clear about Bluesky is how the platform will make money in the long run and whether it will use ads, which are a popular way for websites to make money.
So far, $15 million has been raised for the business, and CEO Jay Graber tells Parhlo World that other investors are already interested. Bluesky has hinted at a few ways they might make money, such as selling domain names, social media accounts, and a market for algorithms. Graber has promised not to “enshittify” the site with ads, but that doesn’t mean she won’t allow them at all.
Graber didn’t think Bluesky would always be free of ads like it is now when asked if that was always the case.
I think the ways we would look into ads, if we did, would be much more user-driven,” Graber said on stage at Parhlo World StrictlyVC event in San Francisco on Wednesday. “We want to make sure that our incentives stay in line with those of our users and that we don’t become a business where the user’s attention is the product.”
Graber says it’s very important for Bluesky not to copy the mistakes and models of other social media networks. In the past, these networks have used an automated feed to show ads to users. Because Bluesky’s system is open, users can make their own feeds without ads, which means that the company can’t really make money off of ads alone.
“At my core, I’m an advocate for digital rights,” Graber said. “People need to be able to manage the social networks they use because they’ve grown into very important systems.” “I just believe it needs to be done.”
Bluesky may try ads in the future, but only if they don’t get in the way of the main user experience. Later, the CEO explained off-stage that this could include putting ads in Bluesky’s search results as a less annoying way for the platform to run ads.
Graber did rule out one way to make money, though: deals to license AI. Off-stage, the CEO told Parhlo World that Bluesky probably won’t make as much money from these deals as other social media sites have. The company has already promised not to use Bluesky posts to train AI. But Graber wants to set up a way for Bluesky users to tell bots that they don’t want them to scrape their information, similar to the robots.txt protocol that websites have.
Reddit just had its first profitable quarter ever, in part because it charges companies that use generative AI to train their systems on its material. People are already scraping Bluesky to make free AI training datasets from its public posts. This means that Bluesky is also collecting a lot of useful data. Folks can do this without much trouble since Bluesky is based on an open system. One big difference is that Reddit is private by default, but businesses can pay to get in.
It’s likely going to be a long time before Bluesky starts making money, since the company is currently focusing on growth. There are now 24 million users on Graber’s platform, up from 3 million in February. The company still has a lot of room to grow. More than 275 million people use Threads every month, and it still doesn’t have ads.
Graber said in other parts of the talk that maintaining the AT protocol, which Bluesky is based on, could lead to a business that provides services to other platforms built on it (though Bluesky is the only platform there right now). It’s not impossible for the CEO to run Bluesky and keep the AT protocol environment alive and well at the same time.
Also Read: Bluesky Says That in the Last 24 Hours, 1 Million People Signed Up for the App
One of the best things about Bluesky is that its system is open, but this also makes it harder to make money with. That’s kind of the point. Facebook, Instagram, and other traditional social media sites have done well because they can keep people and control the whole experience. Bluesky, on the other hand, is meant to give people control and power, which makes making money from it less simple.
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