Bluesky CEO Jay Graber doesn’t rule out advertising

blue sky has flown this year thanks to a vibrant poster community, user customization options, and a decentralized protocol that doesn’t limit users to the choices of a billionaire CEO. But a question mark hanging over Bluesky is how the platform will eventually make money and whether it will use the most common business on the Internet: ads.

The company has raised $15 million so far, and CEO Jay Graber tells TechCrunch that it’s already getting attention from other investors. Bluesky has hinted at some possible revenue streams, including social media subscriptions, an algorithm marketplace, and the sale of domain names. While Graber has committed not to “enshittify” the platform with ads, it doesn’t rule them out completely.

When asked if Bluesky would always be advertiser-free like it is today, Graber said, “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”

“I think the ways we would explore advertising, if we did, would be much more driven by user intent,” Graber said on stage Wednesday at TechCrunch’s Strictly VC event in San Francisco. “We want to keep our incentives aligned with users and make sure we’re not becoming a model where the user’s attention is the product.”

It is very important for Bluesky not to replicate the models and mistakes of other social networks, according to Graber, where the platforms have historically shown ads to users through an algorithmic feed. The way Bluesky is built largely precludes a business model that relies solely on ads, because users could create alternative ad-free feeds in its open protocol.

“At heart, I’m a digital rights activist,” Graber said. “People need to be able to control the social networks in which they communicate because they have become truly vital structures. I just think it needs to be done.”

However, Bluesky may eventually experiment with ads in a way that does not compromise the core user experience. That could include serving ads in Bluesky’s search results, the CEO later clarified offstage, as an example of a less intrusive advertising method the platform could try.

Graber ruled out one source of revenue: AI licensing deals. The CEO told TechCrunch offstage that Bluesky likely won’t benefit from these deals like other social media platforms have, and the company has already pledged not to train AI on Bluesky’s posts. However, Graber would like to establish something like the robots.txt protocol that exists for websites, as a way for Bluesky users to indicate that they do not want robots to scrape their content.

Reddit just posted their first profitable quarterin part by charging generative AI companies to train on their content. While Bluesky is also accumulating a lot of valuable data, people are We are already scraping the platform to create AI training data sets. with Bluesky public publications for free. Because Bluesky is based on an open protocol, it is difficult to stop people from doing this. This is a key difference with Reddit, which is closed by default but can charge businesses to access it.

It will probably be a long time until Bluesky starts actively monetizing, as the company is primarily focused on growth these days. Graber’s platform has grown from 3 million users in February to 24 million users today, but the platform has plenty of room to scale. Threads has over 275 million monthly users and even hasn’t introduced ads yet.

At other points in the interview, Graber said that a business could grow from maintaining the AT protocol, on which Bluesky is based, such as offering services to other platforms based on it (although Bluesky is the only platform that currently exists ). The CEO states that maintaining a thriving ecosystem on the AT protocol and running Bluesky are not at odds with each other.

Bluesky’s open protocol is one of the main things that makes it great, but it also presents some inherent challenges to monetization. That’s the point. Traditional social media companies like Facebook and Instagram have been successful because they can retain users and control the entire experience. But Bluesky is designed to give users control and power, something that makes monetization less easy.

Personal opinion:

“Bluesky CEO Jay Graber’s statement that he would not exclude ads as part of the future outlook seems like a thoughtful move. While Bluesky has excelled at offering an ad-free service, the future outlook requires sustainable revenue models. If ads are implemented in a way that doesn’t impact the user experience, they could be a good way to generate additional revenue without compromising on the quality of the service.”