Bluesky Teases Creator Payments While New Sign-Ups Explode After Elon Musk’s Destruction of Twitter

Bluesky, the social media platform that’s seen tremendous growth over the past year, announced Thursday that the company raised a $15 million Series A round of financing, according to a post on the Bluesky website. The announcement also includes hints at what’s to come, including the possibility of subscriptions, payments, and other new features in the future.

The new round of funding was led by Blockchain Capital, according to the Bluesky announcement on Thursday, along with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, and Amir Shevat of Darkmode. But Bluesky was quick to say in its announcement that it wasn’t really embracing crypto and had no plans to push tokens or NFTs on the platform.

“This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.),” the company said in its release.

Bluesky experiences a new wave of sign-ups whenever Elon Musk’s Twitter (now officially known as X) fucks up some element of the experience over there. Bluesky has added three million users in the past month alone, surging from 10 million users to 13 million, with much of that growth directly attributed to Musk’s legal shenanigans in Brazil and the recent announcement that the blocking function on X would soon be disappearing.

What will be new after this latest round of funding? Bluesky recently introduced features like direct messages and video, two things that simply put it closer in line with the same things that X already offers. But there are some more expansive ideas on the horizon, including paid subscriptions for features like higher quality video uploads and profile customizations.

But Rose Wang, the COO of Bluesky, said these paid features won’t allow someone to get boosted by Bluesky in some way, as it now does on X when someone buys a blue checkmark for $8 per month.

“Bluesky is powered by a 20-person core team, moderators, and support agents. Our biggest costs are team and infrastructure. Subscription revenue helps us improve the app, grow the developer ecosystem, and gives us time to explore business models beyond traditional ads,” Wang wrote on Thursday.

The company is also looking at developing a payments system which would allow creators to get paid, though details about how that might work were scarce. Musk has been talking about adding in-app payment system to X ever since he bought the site in late 2022, but has so far not delivered on that promise.

Reactions to the news about creator payments was mixed on Bluesky, with some people very concerned that introducing those kinds of incentives might be a bad idea.

“If anything ruins Bluesky, it’s gonna be the need to make money,” said Kyle Orland, senior gaming editor at Ars Technica.

The rise of Bluesky as an independent social media platform has been a breath of fresh air for a lot of people who spent years posting at sites like Twitter. And not just because Elon Musk has turned the site into a Nazi bar. Very Online People™ of a certain age grew up seeing social media sites come and go (remember MySpace and Friendster), and assumed sites like Twitter and Facebook would meet the same end, starting the cycle fresh when new offerings came along. But that’s not really how it turned out.

Instead, the past 20 years have seen a lot of consolidation (Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and WhatsApp in 2014) as well as copycat services from the same Big Tech monopolies (Facebook, now Meta, launched Threads in 2023). Bluesky’s Paul Frazee is familiar with the old cycle and knows that the social media platform won’t be around forever. That’s why Frazee says the company has built its service with portability in mind.

Frazee responded Thursday to a post (sorry, I really can’t call them skeets) from someone who liked Bluesky but encouraged creators to drive their audience to their own website or newsletter, “so that in 5 years when Bluesky sucks, it won’t take your entire audience with it!”

“FWIW the Bluesky team agrees. Hopefully not in 5 years (I’d like at least 10 good years) but everybody knows the cycle. The company is a future adversary. That’s why we did this whole thing, so other apps could replace us if/when it happens,” Frazee posted.

Frazee linked to an explanation thread about how the platform basically makes every user their own website.

Nobody knows for sure whether Bluesky will be able to continue its rapid growth. But jumping from 1 million users in Sept. 2023 to over 13 million today is a sign that social media users are at least looking for fresh alternatives to the Big Tech monopoly.

“With every month that passes, the need for an open social network becomes more clear,” Bluesky said in its announcement Thursday. “We’re very excited about where we’re headed—we’re building not just another social app, but an entire network that gives users freedom and choice. Thank you for joining us.”