The Future Of Media And Advertising On Bluesky

Last week, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber admitted that advertising may be a part of the newly launched platform’s future. I wasn't surprised. With the addition of tens of millions of users in only a few short months, the company's growth rate is phenomenal. Servicing that type of growth comes at a high cost, and the corporation also has investors it needs to satisfy. In 2008–2009, when Twitter initially sought funding at a valuation of one billion dollars or more, Bluesky saw growth similar to that of Twitter. An additional year later, in 2010, Twitter expanded its business model to include advertising.

It's never easy to integrate ads into a brand-new web service, but Bluesky makes the process twice as difficult. Bluesky gained notoriety as a decentralized solution to the many problems plaguing social media. With its foundation in a protocol that lets users relocate to warmer climates, BlueSky must tread carefully to avoid the rent-seeking that propelled Google, Amazon, and Meta to their trillion-dollar valuations.

This begs the question, what constitutes "good" advertising on a platform like BlueSky?

First things first: advertising isn't what drives surveillance capitalism. You might say it's the key. How we decide to use that gasoline to power our engines is what counts. Companies like Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, and others have fine-tuned their engines to support opaque and control-oriented economic models. The services they've developed allow them to collect and benefit from large amounts of attention, which they then use to generate results for advertising and their financial gain. But with the advent of AI models, the veil of secrecy around these platforms has grown even more opaque, making it impossible for either their users or their clients to understand how they function.

Advertisers, publishers, and audiences all benefit greatly from a well-functioning media ecosystem. In many instances, marketers may lend a hand to a new service in expanding its products, and they can come up with creative ads that enhance the media outlet's overall experience. This was true not only of the print and digital businesses I co-founded after Wired but also of all my previous publications and websites. Similarly, at Federated Media, the first at-scale platform I co-founded, we were trailblazers in the use of "native advertising" and the idea of "conversational media," the forerunner of the current social media crisis.

BlueSky has a tremendous chance to develop a successful company and bring back the type of mutually beneficial model that powered high-quality media ecosystems in the past. Thus, I respectfully offer the following recommendations on the management of advertising on Bluesky.

1. Make it easy for your clients and buyers to communicate with one another.

I need to write lengthier postings to fully explain this idea, which is maybe the most disruptive one I'm suggesting. This goes against the grain of all at-scale platforms' business models, which demand tight control over the customer connection, which they are rightfully proud to maintain. Beat this model by going against it.

2. Prioritize developers.
Just 20 people were working for Bluesky when its rapid expansion started a few months ago. The firm is modest. The infrastructure required to support massive advertising campaigns is beyond its capabilities to ever develop. To get there, it has to foster an ecosystem of talented developers who can create things for it. Bluesky should never stray from this strategy, even as the company expands. The company is already central to its culture. It should welcome outside developers who share its goal if it wants to get the first versions of the ads correctly.

3. Set the data free.

In keeping with the above suggestions, make sure Bluesky itself has robust data streams going into and out, and make sure everyone can access, consume, process, and export those feeds. Because Bluesky is based on an open standard, many third-party firms would gladly set up dashboards and instrumentation of those streams for you, so you won't even have to do it in the Bluesky service.

4. Support, protect, and grow the media industry and the web-based on inbound links.

Rather than prioritizing journalism and connecting on their platforms, every single one of them has deliberately worked to hinder it. I believe it's brilliant that Bluesky's leadership has already begun to include tactics that promote great journalism and safeguard the free web. Encouraging high-quality connections and news may not lead to a $100 billion firm, but if that's your objective, you've likely already gone off the rails.

I thought of it to be useful to combine all suggestions in one spot, even though I'm sure Bluesky is already thinking about most of them. Thank you for reading, and feel free to leave a comment below if you have any more thoughts, opinions, or disputes about the potential Bluesky commercials.

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