How Bluesky rose from the ashes of Twitter to challenge X and Threads | Wilnesh News

A high-profile U.S. presidential election introduced millions of people to Bluesky.

The microblogging startup said it has added 8.7 million new users since Election Day, underscoring consumer appetite for alternatives to Elon Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) and Meta’s Threads interest. While these larger social media platforms still dwarf Bluesky, the startup now has more than 22 million users and shows no signs of slowing down.

Bluesky Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang told CNBC that Bluesky’s growth may seem sudden, but the company has been experiencing explosive growth in users for more than a year.

September, blue sky explain Two million users flooded the service a week after Brazil’s Supreme Court temporarily suspended X’s service in the country for failing to appoint local legal representation and failing to comply with the country’s content moderation policies.

Bluesky experienced a surge in July 2023, when X (then still known as Twitter) temporarily limited the number of posts users could read per day.

Wang said the company expected user growth to decline when Brazil lifts its ban in October, but that Bluesky’s growth momentum now feels different after the election.

“It’s so cool when your grandma says, ‘Oh, I know what you’re doing,'” she said.

If Bluesky continues to attract users quickly, it could be on the verge of a turning point, said David Carr, research editor at Internet analytics firm Sameweb. Carr said the app’s popularity is similar to the early days of Google, when the search engine began to attract consumer interest and publicity while fending off competition from older and larger search engines such as AltaVista and Yahoo.

“We’ve seen these reversals at least early in the history of social networking,” Carr said, noting that the once mighty Myspace eventually lost to Facebook.

During the height of the pandemic in 2021, Wang and Jay Graber, now CEO of Bluesky, lived in a 22-person house in San Francisco with other ambitious entrepreneurs, including artificial intelligence startup Anthropic some of the founders.

At the time, then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was looking for a leader An internal project for a so-called decentralized social network, he selected Graeber.

“Jay was being interviewed by the head of the Bluesky project, and I remember she gave a speech at our house,” Wang said. “We’d all say, ‘That’s cool.'”

The premise behind Bluesky is that users will be able to capture their profiles and data on the app and share it on other social networks that include its open-source software.

Wang said Graeber’s colleagues supported the idea, and she also received support from Twitter. The key question, she said, is when is the right time to introduce a new social network to the market.

Wang joins Graber and other members of the project initial membersLater that year, she said, Daniel Holmgren and Paul Frazee helped launch a project as contractors to learn how to build a decentralized social network that might be as big as Twitter. Network protocol work.

Graber then asked Twitter to spin off Bluesky for independence, and in October 2021, she formed According to documents filed in Delaware, Bluesky Social allowed her team to continue developing the core decentralized social network technology (now known as AT Protocol) and applications as a public benefit corporation.

Dorsey resigned as Twitter CEO and was replaced by Parag Agrawal in November 2021. disclosed publicly The now-formed Bluesky PBLLC said in February 2022: “Our mission is to develop and drive mass adoption of open and decentralized public conversation technologies.”

The timing was perfect, Wang said.

Musk proposed to acquire Twitter in April 2022, and completed the US$44 billion acquisition in October 2022. Announce more details About their project and launched a waiting list for the Bluesky app.

“I remember Jay coming up to me and saying, ‘Hey, guess how many people are on the waiting list? It was a million people in three days,'” Wang said. “I was like, oh, well, now is the time.”

In 2023, getting an invite to Bluesky went viral among eager social media users, and the startup decided to open up its Waiting list It was released to the public in February 2024, laying the foundation for multiple waves of user growth that year.

blue sky declare Last October, the company raised $15 million in an investment round led by Blockchain Capital, bringing the startup’s total funding to $36 million, according to Pitchbook.

Although Blockchain Capital has invested in several cryptocurrency companies, Wang said Bluesky has no ties to cryptocurrencies. But she said it has a “decentralized” spirit.

Wang said no one at Blue Sky was interested in “having a central authority that controls all the data.”

Although Bluesky started out as a side project within Twitter, the startup has lost its last remaining connections to the original Weibo app. In May this year, Dorsey revealed in a statement that he had left the Bluesky board of directors. interview While he respected Graber, he decided to turn his attention to a competing protocol called Nostr.

Dorsey said he believes Knost is more in line with his original vision for the future of social media and is less bureaucratic.

“Everything we wanted in decentralization, everything we wanted in an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with venture capital and a board of directors,” Dorsey said of Bluesky. “That’s not what I wanted to help create.”

Graber acknowledged Dorsey’s role in Bluesky’s origin story in an interview with CNBC.

“In 2019, Jack had a better vision for social media and that’s why he chose me to build this project and we are so grateful to him for building this project,” she said.

Losing Dorsey also gives Bluesky more credibility among users, especially those who believe in the decentralized nature of the app and don’t want to associate with Musk, Meta and Threads’ Mark Zuckerberg or other billionaires Anyone with any relationship.

In an interview with CNBC’s “Money Movers” on Thursday, Graber said Bluesky’s decentralization and openness make the app “billionaire-proof” because users can take their data elsewhere at any time.

“If someone buys it or Bluesky goes out of business, everything is open source,” Graber said. “What happens to Twitter won’t happen to us in the same way because you always have the option to move immediately and not have to start over.”

The future of blue sky business

Jack Johnston, senior director of social innovation at digital marketing agency Tinuiti, said advertisers have noticed Bluesky’s growing popularity and want to know more about its user demographics.

“That’s the first question a lot of brands ask, and for better or worse, Bluesky doesn’t disclose much about that data other than the number of users accessing the platform,” Johnston said.

Wang said it makes sense that Bluesky has attracted advertiser interest, but the platform’s audience may join the current ad-free service in part because they’re tired of seeing the deluge of online ads on other social apps.

“I just don’t think Gen Z is going to do that,” Wang said.

Graber echoed this sentiment on CNBC’s “Money Movers,” saying Bluesky “is not going to build an algorithm that just pushes ads at you and locks in users. That’s not our model.”

Wang said that if Blue Sky continues to provide quality services to users, “the brands will come,” but they “have to figure out how to talk to people sincerely.”

Wang said Blue Sky has no current plans to build an online advertising business, but the company is open to the idea as long as it’s not an intrusive experience. She pointed to Reddit’s “community-based” advertising model, in which companies can serve online ads tailored to the interests of users in specific Reddit subreddits, as an example of how startups can advertise. An example.

Wang also pointed to TikTok’s boost model, which advertisers can use to promote organic videos from third-party creators as if they were in-house ads.

“The video works well because it’s real,” Wang said. “Just enhance that video and then make sure the creator gets a bigger cut than they normally would.”

Wang said Bluesky is looking for ways to support users “who actually make the web awesome and fun.”

Wang said that in the “mid to long term,” Bluesky may also potentially build its own payments platform that would allow users to pay each other and take a commission from each transaction.

Sameweb’s Carr said that despite Bluesky’s popularity, the startup’s eventual monetization plans risk upsetting users.

“How do you go about turning this into a business, and the more dubious version of it is, ‘How do I know that once you monetize this, you’re not going to do it in a way that I hate?'” Carr said.

watch: Bluesky CEO: Our platform is ‘very different’ from any other platform in social media