Bluesky Aims to Make Buying, Selling, and Raising Capital on the Network Easier

Executives argued that advertising is not the only way to generate revenue, and that alternative models are feasible when it comes to earning income.

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Bluesky plans to introduce payments in the coming months, the first step in its strategy to monetize without relying on ads. CEO Tony Schneider and CEO Rose Wang outlined their plans Thursday at TechCrunch Disrupt, explaining how the company hopes to expand the business and fundraising activities it already does on its decentralized social network.

"People are actually selling things, successfully collecting and supporting each other on the network," Schneider said. "We want to make it easier, and the way we want to do that is if you see something on the network that you like and support, you can support it with money, and we want to do it in a way that works for Bluesky and for all the other apps out there, so that it works across the whole network."

Schneider, the former Automattic CEO, took over in March after longtime CEO Jay Graber stepped down. While on stage, he said he was surprised by the reaction to his appointment, with some users joking that it was the beginning of the end for the platform. These comments reflected fears of a change in leadership and unwanted changes for Bluesky.

Schneider said he knows users can leave Bluesky for another platform if the company introduces features or changes they don't like, a fact he says will keep the leadership team accountable as it prepares to introduce monetization in the coming months.

The executives argued that advertising is not the only viable business model for a social network.

"I think there's a story about monetization that feels like advertising is something we have to do and it's ruining the network," Wang said. What was really promising about Tony joining us was that he built WordPress Automatic into a $10 billion business, with one billion going to the parent company and the rest to the ecosystem.

Wang also pointed to Bluesky's status as a public benefit corporation (PBC), which he said puts the company's mission at the center of its business strategy.

"Yes, we need to make money, but because of our infrastructure, we can't lock people in," Wang said. So what's really important to us is the people who are creating value in the networks these days, are the people who are getting the value that's coming in or the money that's coming in. "And I kind of think of it as a feudal society where we work for a few owners and they dictate everything, and then we have to pay our wages as a tariff."

Bluesky's goal is to give users ownership of their digital identities and control over their networks, while creating a more open internet where value and revenue flow directly to the people who produce them.

"First, we're starting with payments, but I think that's the real infrastructure layer of what we're doing, and not just building another app," Stwang said.

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Ayesha is a consumer news reporter at TechCrunch. Before joining the publication in 2021, he was a telecom reporter at MobileSyrup. Ayesha holds a Bachelor's degree with honors from the University of Toronto and a Master's degree in Journalism from Western University.

You can contact or confirm Aisha by sending an email to [email protected] or by sending an encrypted message to aisha_malik.01 on Signal.

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