It’s unusual for a new social media service to gain a foothold in a market where X (formerly Twitter), Instagram and TikTok dominate people’s phones. but blue skyis an app that’s been around for about two years and has been gaining traction amid a recent surge in new users, likely due to growing dissatisfaction with X, the company said.
The platform has been growing ever since it opened as an invite-only service in February 2023, but membership numbers snowballed after the November 5 presidential election. Bluesky now has more than 22 million users, up from about 12 million in mid-October, according to company data.
Bluesky’s chief operating officer, Rose Wang, recently told CBS MoneyWatch that part of Bluesky’s recent growth is due to changes at X Company under billionaire owner Elon Musk. He believes this is due to what he did.
mask, who bought twitter A $44 billion service overhaul in 2022. Rename to X Priority will be given to the account of the person who paid the fee with a blue check mark. However, accounts with more than 2,500 “verified subscriber followers” can access premium features for free.
Advertising sales are approximately It soon became soft Companies including Apple, Coca-Cola and Disney removed paid advertising from X after Musk took over the platform. last year. The Guardian recently said that I won’t post anymore The contents are posted on the official account related to X. In a statement, the British newspaper described X as “toxic” and added that the platform was being used by Mr. Musk to shape political debate.
Musk has become one of the most talked-about speakers in the 2024 campaign, frequently sharing conspiratorial stories while promoting President-elect Donald Trump, according to a CBS News investigation. Found it.
When Twitter became the ” he added.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
What is the difference between X and Bluesky?
PCWorld tech writer Dave Parrack wrote in a recent column that Bluesky resembles “old Twitter” in layout and content. He added: “Blue Sky feels like a safe haven. Very little trollingAnd when that happens, people don’t bite. ”
Bluesky users can find people to follow through so-called “starter packs” or curated lists of people to follow by interest or field, like this group of gardening writers. The company says this allows users to quickly build a feed of posts from people of their choice, rather than having the content fed to them by a company’s algorithm.
Wang said users will interact more on the service than on X because they can adjust their preferences to their interests and connect with other like-minded users.
Some businesses report higher engagement on their posts on the Bluesky app compared to competing platforms. For example, executives at the Boston Globe noted that the paper’s posts on Blue Sky receive three times as much traffic as meta threads.
“30% of Bluesky users are contributors, compared to 1% on Twitter,” Wang said.
Still, it’s questionable whether Bluesky’s surge in new users is having a big impact on X’s consumer base.
The presidential election caused traffic to Musk’s social media services to skyrocket, according to tracking service SimilarWeb. It found that more than 46 million US users visited X on November 6, the day after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory, more than any other day in the previous year. According to the data, on the same day, approximately 115,000 people in the United States deactivated their X accounts.
How Bluesky makes money
Although Bluesky’s user base is rapidly expanding, the company remains small in terms of funding and staff, with Wang calling it a “small team of 20” employees, including himself and CEO Jay Graber. It is explained that there is. The service was founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, but the business has been independent since 2021.
The company raised $15 million in venture funding in October, followed by an $8 million seed round in 2023. Wang said BlueSky is focused on finding ways to sustain its business, which will soon include new revenue streams from subscriptions and financial transactions. .
“We plan to launch subscriptions at the end of this year,” Wang said. “It’s going to be custom aesthetics, custom avatar frames, and probably more video uploads.”
The company also plans to enable financial transactions between users, such as when game designers want to sell their products to Bluesky users. Wang pointed out that the service costs a portion of the payment.
He added that Bluesky does not accept advertising and has not promoted itself in the wake of Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
To be sure, Bluesky may never reach the scale of larger social media networks that advertisers flock to to reach larger groups of users. For example, Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, had more than 3 billion daily users across its apps in its most recent quarter and recorded nearly $40 billion in revenue during that time.
How do I register with Bluesky?
Bluesky opened as an invite-only platform in February 2023, but now anyone can sign up for the service.
The service’s user handle is a little different than X and other social media networks, as it ends with the site’s domain, .bsky.social. Posts are limited to 300 characters, which is 20 more characters than X. You can also upload photos and videos, but videos cannot be longer than 60 seconds. GIFs and emojis are also available.
Like other platforms, Bluesky lets you tag people by typing “@” before their username, “like” a post by tapping the heart icon, and use hashtags. to highlight themes. Bluesky added a menu to hashtags so that when users click on a hashtag, they see different options to show or mute posts on a particular topic.
“It’s more of a community space, a Reddit model that lands in a cozy corner,” Wang added. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the people and what I encourage people to do is come to Blue Sky, give it a chance and see for yourself what the experience is like. ”
contributed to this report.
