Hrishi Mittal

Bluesky

A couple of thoughts on Bluesky which is taking off after the 2024 US presidential elections.

  1. The engagement on Bluesky is much higher compared to Twitter (X). There's no bigger pull for marketers than free easy attention. So I expect the platform will continue to grow steadily.

  2. Bluesky has raised around $36 million in VC funding so far (as per Google Gen AI). Now that it's taking off, it's highly likely VCs will want to throw even more money at it. So Bluesky will probably put off monetisation even longer.

Right now, users are projecting all sorts of rosy dreams about how it'll make money and always remain wonderful and free and open. But, it needs to make 100s of millions or billions of dollars in annual revenue to provide to a return to investors. This will eventually become a problem.

When this point is raised, some people point out that the technical architecture of Bluesky prevents any such problems. But theory and practice are quite different. Just look at Mastodon.