The newest of the social apps: Stats about Bluesky

You’ve heard of X and Threads, but have you heard of their newest rival, Bluesky? Working in Social means keeping up to date with all the latest platform developments, so we’ve made this easy for you by deep-diving Bluesky.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is an up-and-coming social media platform that describes itself as “social media as it should be” and is seen to rival Elon Musk’s X (previously known as Twitter). The comparison between Bluesky and X is quite frankly because it looks exactly the same and it functions in pretty much the same way.

The reason for this is,  ‘Bluesky was initially a project kicked off by Jack Dorsey when he was CEO of Twitter in 2019. Jack chose Jay Graber to lead Bluesky, and Twitter paid Bluesky services income to build an open social protocol for public conversation that it could someday become a client on.’ According to Bluesky, ‘In late 2022, Twitter chose to sever the service agreement with Bluesky, and Bluesky agreed. The Bluesky PBC has continued to pursue its original founding mission to “develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.”

Bluesky themselves say they are ‘creating a version of social media where it’s built by many people, and it still comes together as a cohesive, easy-to-use experience.’ They say they ‘modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, when anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs.’ and ‘believe this will unlock a new era of experimentation and innovation in social media.’

Who owns Bluesky?

According to the BlueSky website, the platform is owned by Jay Graber and the Bluesky team. It is a Public Benefit Corporation and its board is made up of Jay Graber; Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber/XMPP; Mike Masnick; and Kinjal Shah.

Key stats:

• Bluesky has a market share of 0.12%
• Bluesky has awarded $10,000 in grants to development projects that use its technology
• Bluesky has raised a total of $21 million in funding, most recently raising $8 million from a seed round.

Moderation Procedures

Bluesky is very thorough with their moderation procedures, and also very open about them. Their moderation procedures can be found on their website, as well as on their blog. They say their ‘approach to moderation is three-fold: automated filtering, manual admin actions, and community labeling.’ They put a big emphasis on their moderation being observable by anyone and say their approach ‘exposes the internals of the system for anyone to observe’.

In their Composable Moderation blog, they outline the three main ways they are designing an open moderation system:

• Anyone can define and apply “labels” to content or accounts (i.e. “spam”, “nsfw”). This is a separate service, so they do not have to run a PDS (personal data server) or a client app in order to do so.
• Labels can be automatically generated (by third-party services, or by custom algorithms) or manually generated (by admins, or by users themselves)
• Any service or person in the network can choose how these labels get used to determine the final user experience.
• Bluesky’s moderation team reviewed 358,165 community guidelines and terms of service violation reports in 2023.

Bluesky vs. X

According to the BBC, ‘The main difference, is that Bluesky is decentralised – a complicated term which basically means users can host their data on servers other than those owned by the company.

This means that rather than being limited to having a specific account named after Bluesky, people can (if they like) sign up using an account they themselves own.’

You can read about Bluesky’s AT Protocol on their website, but to summarise, it is an ‘open-source framework for building social apps, meaning people have transparency into how it is built and what is being developed. It creates a standard format for user identity, follows, and data on social apps, allowing apps to interoperate and users to move across them freely. It is a federated network with account portability.’

The three main benefits of the AT Protocol are:

• Account portability
• Algorithmic choice
• Composable moderation

Bluesky allows users to create personalised feeds, giving users more choice and flexibility over what kind of content they consume. According to Tech Radar ‘Bluesky goes further, giving you algorithmic choice by allowing you to create your own custom feeds. While some knowledge of the AT protocol is required to create custom feeds, Bluesky sees this as the future of the platform, with “an open marketplace of feeds” giving users access to content in whatever way they want. Graber claims that more than 50,000 feeds are currently available, catering to all kinds interests and themes.’

Another big difference between Bluesky and X is the way both platforms make money.

It doesn’t look like our Paid Social team will be working on the platform anytime soon, as Bluesky has said it wants to avoid advertising as much as possible. This is unlike Twitter, whose profit primarily came from paid advertisements.

Instead, Bluesky is looking into paid services such as custom domains users can pay for, to customise their usernames even further.

If Bluesky intends to stay free from advertising, they might need to look at other ways of driving revenue, such as subscription models.

Key differences:

• Bluesky doesn’t have verification badges, whereas X does
• Bluesky doesn’t have monetisation tools for creators, whereas X does. This will impact digital marketers running influencer activity, as we’re likely to see more creators use X over Bluesky, so this is something to take into account when working on creator activity.
• Amount of users- X is still the front-runner in terms of user numbers, with 500 million monthly active users in comparison to Bluesky’s 27.44 million users
• Bluesky has extra block features, in comparison to X which only has a traditional block feature which still allows blocked users to view your profile and posts. Tech Radar said ‘Bluesky has a traditional block feature, as well as a number of “anti-toxicity” features designed to actively combat harassment. These include the option to detach your original post from someone else’s quote post, giving you control over threads started by you.’ This feature could be a deciding factor for users between both platforms.
• Bluesky does not use AI features, unlike X. According to Tech Radar ‘Bluesky does not run adverts, nor does it harvest user data to train generative AI models – unlike X, which does both’. This could also be another deciding factor for users deciding between both platforms, as users have more privacy on Bluesky, and can trust that their data is not being harvested or manipulated. As Bluesky doesn’t run paid ads, there’s less need for AI features and data collection, as users do not need to be targeted. As we mentioned earlier, users have the ability to create their own feed within a niche they’re interested in thanks to the AT protocol, meaning less data needs to be gathered for AI features, as users have control over their own feeds anyway.
• Although it has more block features than X, Bluesky does not have an option to create a private account. Bluesky says you should consider your posts to be like blog posts, available for anyone to see due to their AT protocol “designed to support public conversations”. If you want a more private experience, you may need to stick to X, as Bluesky also makes likes and comments on your posts publicly available.

Key similarities:

The visual interface of Bluesky and X are very similar, with both feeds looking almost identical. Tech Radar says ‘Bluesky’s interface is visually very similar to X. There’s a vertical feed featuring posts that you can reply to, retweet and like. You can also create posts of up to 256 characters.’

Bluesky User stats

We have gathered the following stats on Bluesky’s users:

• Bluesky has 27.44 million users
• In November 2024, monthly installs of Bluesky app reached 7.85 million.
• visits to Bluesky website reached 154.68 million in December 2024, showing a 93% increase since October 2024.
• In the US and UK, Bluesky app has around 3.5 million daily active users.
• Visits to Bluesky website reached 154.68 million in December 2024, showing a 93% increase since October 2024.
• In December 2024, the United States accounted for over half (55.7%) of website traffic to Bluesky website, followed by the UK (6.97%), Japan (6.75%), Canada (3.05%) and Brazil (3.01%).
• bluesky.com‘s audience is 50.05% male and 49.95% female.
• The largest age group of visitors are 25 – 34 year olds.

Use by age group:

• 18 to 24 – 34.54% of bsky.app’s users belong to this age group
• 25 to 34 – 28.06%
• 35 to 44 – 16.17%
• 45 to 54 – 10.13%
• 55 to 64 – 6.55%
• 65+ – 4.55%
• Bluesky gained more than 5 million users in the two weeks following the results of the US presidential election.
• During the first day after ending the invite-only period, Bluesky gained over 800,000 users. That’s almost a 30% increase.
• Only 48% of Bluesky users create posts of their own
• Over 280,000 direct messages were sent when Bluesky released this feature
• About 4 months after launching, the Bluesky app reached 1 million installs. 40% of installs were from the U.S. alone.
• Users have created over 720 million posts on Bluesky.
• Each visitor views an average 1.51 pages and spends an average of 1 minute and 24 seconds on the site.

Bluesky Traffic stats

• 58% of Bluesky’s traffic originates from desktop computers
• Direct – 74.1% of Bsky.app’s traffic originates from this traffic source
• Organic search – 14.1%
• Social – 6.81%
• Referrals – 4.88%
• Email – 0.1%
• Display ads – 0.01%
• 41% of Bluesky’s organic search traffic originates from the search term “bluesky”

Here are other top search terms:

• bluesky – 40.62% of visitors use this keyword to search for Bluesky through search engines
• blue sky – 3.07%
• bluesky social – 2.23%
• bsky – 2.02%
• blusky – 1.33%

Here’s where the app’s other social traffic originates from:

• Twitter (X) – 69.48% of bsky.app’s social traffic comes from this social media platform
• YouTube – 12.15%
• Reddit – 6.56%
• Tumblr – 4.39%
• Facebook – 2.48%
• Other – 4.94%
• 42% of Bluesky’s referrals originate from the lifestyle industry

Here are the app’s other top referring industries:

• Lifestyle – 42.28%
• Social networks and online communities – 7.04%
• Photography – 6.23%
• Computers, electronics and technology – other – 4.82%
• Video games, consoles and accessories – 4.82%
• The top traffic source to bluesky.com is Direct traffic, driving 53.53% of desktop visits last month, and Organic Search is the 2nd with 36.88% of traffic.
• 70% of the traffic Bluesky receives from social media originates from its rival, Twitter (X).

Whilst Bluesky is definitely still a small fish in a big pond, it’s still a relatively new platform compared to others such as Meta, so it’s worth keeping an eye on to see how it develops. In terms of Paid Social, it’s unlikely we’ll see activity on the platform anytime soon, however with it growing in popularity it’s still one to consider from an organic perspective to gain brand awareness.

Sources for the quotes and information in this blog can be found below:

• https://backlinko.com/bluesky-statistics
• https://www.similarweb.com/website/bluesky.com/#technologies
• https://www.namepepper.com/bluesky-statistics
• https://bloggingwizard.com/bluesky-social-statistics/
• https://metricool.com/bluesky-vs-twitter/
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8dm0ljg4y6o
• https://www.pcworld.com/article/2533396/switching-from-x-twitter-to-bluesky-pros-and-cons.html
• https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8dm0ljg4y6o
• https://socialbee.com/blog/bluesky-vs-twitter/
• https://www.techradar.com/computing/software/what-is-bluesky

Deeper insights:

Our team of experts have knowledge on a range of platforms and can help you elevate both your paid and organic social performance. You can read more about other platforms here:

• Brand Assistant, Hollie Middleton, shared 24 must-see stats about Meta’s social platform Threads
• Client Services Manager, Chloe Hyrziuk, wrote about The battle of the social media giants: 30 stats on TikTok vs Instagram
• I previously shared The LinkedIn Ad formats you need to know about

If you’d like to know more about how our Social team can help drive results for your brand, contact us today.

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