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As the decentralized social media platform, Bluesky exceeds expectations and climbs to over 24M users, the CEO suggests she’s not ruling out ads completely.
As the site has blown up in popularity, gaining several million new sign-ups over the last couple of months, many have been wondering when and how it will be monetized.
The CEO Jay Graber has told TechCrunch she’s already getting attention from other investors and when asked ‘does that mean advertisers can never be on Bluesky’ in response to a previous answer, she said “I don’t think that’s necessarily true.”
Sponsored by @harmonic_ai: At last night's StrictlyVC event, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber discussed the future of advertising on the platform. pic.twitter.com/Fj5vIDCjSD
— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) December 5, 2024
At the publisher’s StrictlyVC event in San Francisco, Graber said on stage: “I think the ways we would explore advertising, if we did, would be much more user intent-driven.
“We want to keep our incentives aligned with users and make sure that we’re not turning into a model where the user’s attention is the product.”
The platform started to see a snowball effect in terms of its new users when Elon Musk announced changes to his X platform – like the changing of the blocking feature.
Bluesky future is being discussed as people wonder about its advertising stance
It’s not the first time the CEO has been asked about the future and advertising decisions. In an interview with Wired in February of this year, Graber said: “We really think that money follows value. There’s been skepticism that this whole model of social can work.
“People are even wondering what it is. So, first of all, we’re trying to prove that this ecosystem has value to users and developers, and that it can kick off an era of open innovation.”
From there, she said they will monetize while following values. Earlier in the year, the company began selling custom domains to users which follows its open web approach. When asked about ads, she said “we can’t enshittify the network with ads.”
The possibility of AI licensing deals, however, has been ruled out with TechCrunch saying this was mentioned offstage as Bluesky likely wouldn’t profit from these deals in the same way other social media platforms have.
Featured Image: Via Bluesky on X
