One of Kick‘s biggest growth strategies has been capitalizing on Twitch‘s mess-ups. Whenever Twitch makes (and then reverts, usually) much-hated policy decisions, or waffles yet again on how much it’ll compensate creators, Kick pops up with a strategically deployed message: on its platform, things are different.
Now, Bluesky is doing the exact same thing to X.
Elon Musk‘s dumpster fire of a site has seen yet another mass exodus this month after introducing two much-hated changes: first, it’s nuking the block feature by allowing users you’ve blocked to see your posts anyway, for some reason; and second, it changed its TOS so all material uploaded to X—videos, posts, photos, art, writing samples, anything—is now automatically licensed “for use with and training of our machine learning and artificial intelligence models, whether generative or another type.”
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For many users who’ve clung to what remains of Twitter’s bones, the one-two punch of these policy changes was the final straw: Bluesky, the X rival founded by Twitter founder/longtime CEO Jack Dorsey, has seen over 3 million new signups this month alone, growing its pre-October user base of around 10 million by nearly a third.
And, with impeccable timing, Bluesky today announced it’s raised a further $15 million from investors, plans to introduce a subscription tier so it can finally start making more money, and plans to cater to content creators with a tip jar feature.
Both the $15 million raise and the future subscription revenue will go toward keeping Bluesky’s 20-person team funded while they “explore business models beyond traditional ads,” the platform’s Chief Operating Officer, Rose Wang, said in a company blog post.
Bluesky has never run ads; instead, its funding thus far came from an $8 million seed round and a paid service that let users have custom domains as their Bluesky handles. (Pricing for those varies widely, with some as low as $7 per year and some above $40/year.)
Its $15 million Series A round was led by Blockchain Capital–but, despite that being a web3 company, Bluesky is quick to assure users that it “will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc).”
Wang added that Bluesky will put funds toward improving Bluesky’s app and growing its “developer ecosystem.”
Bluesky didn’t say how much its subscription tier might be. But it did say that subscribers will get starting perks like profile customization and higher-quality video uploads. No visibility boosting or bogus blue checks here–these upgrades are more in line with the freemium models used by platforms like Discord.
As for the creator tip jar, Bluesky said its plans include “building payment services for people to support their favorite creators and projects.”
“We’re proud of our vibrant community of creators, including artists, writers, developers and more, and we want to establish a voluntary monetization path for them as well,” it said. It didn’t give details about a potential rollout date, and also didn’t say whether it intends to take a cut of creators’ tips.
Either way, this move is Bluesky’s strongest yet in terms of setting itself up as the spiritual successor to what was once Twitter. Others who tried have fallen off–and, if X continues making policy decisions like the block nuke and pushes further into scraping users’ content for its widely disliked AI, Bluesky could be positioned to become the internet’s next big gathering place.
