Is Bluesky a New Source for Traffic?
By: Jacob Cohen Donnelly
In the ongoing quest for traffic, publishers are exploring alternative platforms. Could Bluesky—the Twitter clone that opened to everyone in February— be that traffic source?
This comes with the recent news that Bluesky has seen record sign-ups since the election earlier this month. According to The Verge:
Over the course of this month, that’s changed. It added 700,000 new users in a week. Then, it crossed the 15 million-user mark. This week, CEO Jay Graber said it crossed more than 20 million users and had been adding more than a million users per day.
In many respects, these numbers are small. Facebook and Instagram have billions of users. X reports 600 million monthly users, but Sensor Tower told CNBC it was only 318 million. Threads has crossed into the hundreds of millions.
Interestingly, the growth of Bluesky is, in many respects, a stark reaction to X’s evolution. Similarweb summed it up:
The political dimension of the change is that X owner Elon Musk made himself an outspoken advocate for the candidacy of Donald Trump, although some users may be switching for various reasons such as changes in X’s algorithms and policies.
Regardless of why people are moving, 20 million is not nothing. At some point, a platform reaches a critical mass to support itself. Too few users and we all leave. But once there are enough familiar faces, you find yourself opening it again. I only just made my first post, but I’ve opened it a few times since AMO Pro members requested a “media list.” I’m starting to see familiar faces from X. That makes it more likely I will stay.
But it raises the question: should publishers explore a new place to plant their flags? There are a few schools of thought.
On one hand, being early isn’t inherently beneficial because the advantages you can gain from the platform are limited. If your social team is stretched, focusing them on one platform distracts from another. To be honest, I’ve become less enthusiastic about the idea of publishers having dedicated social teams. In March, I wrote about this:
My answer likely confounded some people, so I wanted to expand on it here. In a nutshell, I told them to get rid of their social media teams. Depending on the company’s size, that department could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars—if not more—in annual salary. In an era when platforms resist giving us free traffic, spending that kind of money is not a good use of resources.
That opinion hasn’t changed. If your primary use for social media is distributing your articles, reinvest that money into something else.
On the other hand, Bluesky’s algorithm is so basic (if it even has one) that there are no obvious penalties when distributing your content compared to X, which deprioritizes tweets with links. If that’s the case, your ability to drive traffic depends on your followers. Since the only way to grow your following is to post, starting earlier could be smart.
As I thought about this piece, I oscillated on how publishers should work with Bluesky. It could be a colossal waste of time. Most everything else has been (remember Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces, which I said were great ideas). But maybe it won’t be and this time, it could become a platform that actually works.
But that doesn’t mean you should hire a team for regular Bluesky posting. Instead, I recommend creating your publisher account, which we’ve done for AMO. You’ll notice our username is our domain name. Follow these steps to verify your domain name so you can do this too.
Then I recommend creating what’s known as a Starter Pack for your publication. This is a curated list of accounts for people to follow. For example, here is what The Economist has set up. It’s a long list of reporters for easy following.
People prefer interacting with individuals over an auto-posting publisher feed. Drive as much of the following to the individuals on your team. Have them share their stories and experiment with simple AMAs where people can submit questions and hopefully get answers. If Bluesky is going to become a platform that more publishers benefit from, it requires the individuals to have followings.
But for the most part, I recommend a patient approach. Set things up, post stories, but don’t get so caught up that you waste time. The network is still small, so deriving much traffic from it will take some time.
The most important thing I’ll say is that, as an industry, we can’t fall into the trap of creating content for our followers on Bluesky. Twitter devolved into reporters writing for their Twitter friends. It was bad then and it’d be bad again if that happened on Bluesky. Just as importantly, don’t forget that it is a platform. While it doesn’t have a great algorithm today, it may one day. When that happens, you may see the traffic decrease.
The game is getting social media followers into an ecosystem where you have some semblance of control: your website and email list.
