Bluesky, often seen as an alternative to X, has welcomed a wave of new users and publishers to its microblogging platform. But how is engagement and referral traffic on Bluesky measuring up to performance on X and Threads?

Some publishers are seeing more referral traffic from Bluesky than from Threads already. But none of the seven publishing executives Digiday spoke with for this article is seeing more traffic coming from Bluesky than from X. There are a few reasons for that, with the most obvious one being a scale issue — the user base on Bluesky is just a fraction of that on X, and so is the volume of publishers’ followers when comparing the two platforms.

Bluesky referral traffic equals about 0.8% of X’s referral traffic to publishers, according to data from analytics firm Chartbeat. From Nov. 1-21 (the most recent data shared with Digiday), Bluesky accounted for 0.017% of social traffic referrals, while X accounted for 2.564% of social referrals.

All of the execs interviewed for this story said it’s too early to have a proper strategy for Bluesky. They’re all still in the test-and-learn phase, and all of the publishers who spoke with Digiday are mostly posting similar content on Bluesky to what they’re posting on X or Threads — if they’re posting at all.

“We are posting basically the same stuff there that we [have] posted on X and Threads. And that has worked for us thus far,” said one head of social media at a large publisher, who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak freely.

Benjamin Cohen, CEO at PinkNews, said his company is also posting the same content on X, Threads and Bluesky. That helps the team at PinkNews “understand if there are specific nuances on these alternative platforms,” Cohen said. Posting on Bluesky also helps PinkNews increase its visibility on the platform and grow its following to “provide helpful insights that will dictate our strategy for this platform,” he added.

Despite publishers’ hesitance to dive head-first into Bluesky, some initial trends are promising.

Traffic from Bluesky to The Boston Globe’s site “is already 3x that of Threads,” according to a Nov. 26 post on Bluesky from Matt Karolian, vp of platforms, research and development at Boston Globe Media. “We are seeing 4.5x the conversions to paying digital subscribers,” he added.

“It’s too early with these platforms to have wildly different strategies. We are starting to see that there are differences between what the audiences on each of these platforms respond to and engage with. But we will keep monitoring the data to see what trends emerge over a longer period of time,” Heather Ciras, deputy managing editor of audience at The Boston Globe, said in an email.

“The quality of the new traffic is notable. Based on recent data, traffic from BlueSky is converting [subscribers] more favorably than Threads,” Karolian told Digiday. He declined to share conversion rates.

However, an issue a number of execs pointed to is the inability to track Bluesky users coming to their sites, a feature the app does not yet provide to publishers. Two execs said they are using UTM codes to track referral traffic from Bluesky, but that likely doesn’t show the full picture.

A head of platforms at a local news publisher, who also traded anonymity for candor, said their company is measuring Bluesky traffic from domain referrals, which “are probably underestimating some stuff here and there. But the data feels high quality. We know the source … and it’s genuine traffic coming from there,” they said.

Wes Bonner, svp of marketing and audience development and head of social at BDG, said the publisher’s titles have secured their handles on Bluesky but haven’t posted on the platform yet.

“It seems what’s doing well are not traffic-optimized posts and that would be our primary KPI with a new platform,” Bonner said. “Time will tell if … it’s somewhere we want to put any significant resources.”

A head of audience at a political news publisher, who asked to remain anonymous, said their company is also waiting to invest resources on Bluesky because they feel the platform has an overrepresentation of journalists and left-leaning audiences.

“I don’t want to conflate energy amongst the industry with enthusiasm amongst our audience,” they said.

Other publishers are also watching the platform to further develop a strategy there.

“The Times has seen promising engagement from Bluesky users as the users there have reportedly grown in recent weeks, but we continue to allocate our efforts across a number of social media networks,” a New York Times spokesperson said.

It’s a similar story at The Wall Street Journal. “It’s early days, and right now we are focused on testing in order to gain insight into the audiences on Bluesky,” said Taneth Evans, head of digital at The Wall Street Journal.

But at CNN, Bluesky is seen as “mainly a vehicle” to share news posts and drive people to CNN’s site and app, according to a spokesperson.

“We see more on-platform engagement on X … whereas Blueksy and Threads [are] more a vehicle to share news and drive users back to CNN platforms,” the CNN spokesperson added. They did not answer a question on whether Bluesky was doing a good job of that.

Newsweek’s svp of audience Josh Awtry said the company is posting more frequently to X than Bluesky: roughly 80-100 posts a day on X vs. under 20 a day on Bluesky. “We don’t want to flood the zone with robo-posts every five minutes. We are not trying to overwhelm readers. We are being more deliberate, with much more of a steady hand on the wheel,” Awtry said.

So far, Newsweek’s strategy has resulted in a smaller overall audience for Bluesky’s posts compared to X or Threads, but higher engagement (comments, reposts and likes), according to Awtry. Bluesky has comparable referral traffic to Threads, he added, without sharing specific data. At the end of the day, Newsweek is looking for growth on Bluesky — whether that’s referral traffic, engagement or followers, Awtry said.

Because of Bluesky’s scale issue, a head of audience development at a large digital publisher, who requested anonymity, told Digiday their company is creating “new platforms metrics” internally. The strategy combines referral traffic from a range of different platforms, including Threads, Bluesky and Reddit, to measure the volume of traffic these new platforms are driving.

Perhaps that signals how insignificant of a role Bluesky and Threads has for publishers so far.

“In terms of sheer volume, this is kind of small potatoes,” the anonymous head of platforms at a local news publisher said.

What we’ve heard

“I think the AI platforms — we will all continue to learn and evolve and get better. I don’t think anybody is perfect right now. For anyone to say that they are is misinformation.”

— Jessica Chan, head of publisher partnerships at Perplexity, on the issue of generative AI platforms misrepresenting publishers’ content.

The Verge’s new “freemium” model

On Tuesday, The Verge launched its first subscription and a metered paywall. 

It’s an interesting move, given the fact that The Verge has been trying to build out new functions that would allow the publisher to distribute posts on its site and on free, federated platforms — like Threads, Mastodon and Bluesky — at the same time. But editor-in-chief Nilay Patel has been openly critical of publishers relying heavily on big platforms for distribution and audience building.

In a letter to readers announcing the subscription, Patel cited this as one of the reasons for launching a subscription (in addition to the fact that readers wanted a way to support The Verge, the letter said).

“Major social media platforms are openly hostile to links, huge changes to search have led to the death of small websites, and everything is covered in a layer of AI slop and weird scams. The algorithmic media ecosystem is now openly hostile to the kind of rigorous, independent journalism we want to do,” he wrote.

When asked about The Verge’s new dynamic paywall (meaning there’s no set number of stories a reader can access), publisher Helen Havlak said in an email that the company is taking a “freemium” approach by allowing The Verge’s core news articles and the site’s homepage newsfeed (built to mimic a social media feed) to remain free and that the subscription was built to “deepen our relationship to our loyal readers.”

A Vox Media spokesperson declined to answer questions about how many articles a reader can access on average, and if there’s a goal number of subscribers.

The Verge readers can pay $7 a month or $50 a year to get fewer ads, support for full-text RSS feeds, access to The Verge’s more premium content and two newsletters. Annual subscribers also get access to a limited-edition print magazine.

Numbers to know

>50%: The share of Hearst’s profits coming from its B2B business, up from 13% in 2013.

200: About the number of people let go at Hearst Magazines.

8%: Roughly the share of the Associated Press’s workforce that will be offered buyouts and laid off.

$123.5 million: The amount of BuzzFeed’s debt, which creditors could cash in on starting Dec. 3.

What we’ve covered

Publishers tease new AI-powered products to come 

• Some of the first media companies to strike deals with OpenAI say they’re getting ready to release new AI-enabled features that aim to benefit readers, publishers and advertisers.
• One of the latest examples is Dotdash Meredith, which is using AI to create a new way to target readers with contextual ads.

Read more about what DDM, Time and The New York Times are building here.

How news publishers are adapting post-election

• Yahoo News, like other news publishers, are figuring out how they may need to adapt to either a similar “Trump bump” of site traffic boosts they saw during Trump’s first term — or a potential drop-off in news interest.
• Yahoo News saw audience interest in the news increase leading up to and after the election, but also saw some interest burn out.

Listen to the latest Digiday podcast episode featuring Yahoo News’s Kat Downs Mulder here.

U.S. lifestyle-focused publishers made dramatic changes to subscription pricing in 2024

• Lifestyle publishers swung wide with annual subscription price changes in 2024 — both in increases and decreases year over year.
• Lifestyle publishers also had more drastic individual publication price changes when compared to professional and news publications.

Read more from the third installment of Digiday’s 2024 Subscription Index research series here.

More publishers make a little from programmatic, while fewer will make it a large focus

• More publishers are getting just a small amount of revenue from programmatic. A full quarter of the close to 50 publisher professionals surveyed said in Q3 this year that they get a very small or small portion of their revenue from programmatic, up from 17% in Q1.
• At the same time, fewer publishers said in the later part of this year that they’ll put a large focus on building their programmatic ads business in the next six months.

Read more from the Digiday+ Research survey here.

Facebook’s new views metric has little impact on publishers’ social strategy

• Facebook recently announced that “views” would be the main metric used to measure how all content is performing on the platform.
• Publishing execs told Digiday this new primary metric is just another way of measuring impressions, and the change has no impact on their Facebook strategy.

Read more about Facebook’s metrics change and what publishers are doing about it here.

What publishers can be thankful for this year

• Publishers had to deal with a range of challenges this year, from AI companies freely gobbling up their content to declining (or at least stagnant) referral traffic from search and social platforms.
• But media execs can be grateful for a few things: another Trump bump, Google Discover traffic, AI company pay outs, interest rate cuts, a shift to smaller social platforms and Q3 revenue.

Read more about what’s keeping publishing execs in the holiday spirit here.

What we’re reading

Amazon wants to license publishers’ content for its Alexa voice assistant

Amazon wants to pay news publishers to use their content for a new, generative AI-powered version of its voice assistant Alexa, set to debut next year, Axios reported. Alexa will be able to give customized responses to users’ questions about breaking news in real time.

ChatGPT is misrepresenting publisher content

Analysis from Columbia University’s Tow Center has found ChatGPT — OpenAI’s generative AI chatbot — is misattributing or misrepresenting publishers’ content, regardless of whether they allow OpenAI’s bot crawlers, according to the Columbia Journalism Review. The Tow Center found a number of instances where content was being cited inaccurately.

Media M&A may kick up again in 2025

Investment and dealmaking in the media industry is expected to gain some momentum next year, thanks to a friendlier regulatory environment, a hot news cycle and the shifts in cable news, Semafor reported.