Bluesky tests paid subscription features as social media giant grows

Social app Bluesky is working on paid add-on features that would be available to users with a monthly subscription. 

On the developer platform GitHub, the Bluesky team is experimenting with add-ons for which users would pay access.

Such add-on features include a Bluesky profile badge, analytics, longer video uploads, and profile customisations.  

However, Bluesky said on GitHub that it is a user interface mockup and the paid features could change ahead of the launch.

The add-on mockups are priced at $8 (€7.50) per month or $72 per year (€68) for Bluesky+, which could also change. 

Bluesky began in 2019 as a research initiative at Twitter, now called X, and became an independent company in 2021. Bluesky was launched to find a way to remain free to end users without using advertising and has said it does not want to “require selling user data for ads” for monetisation. 

The platform has seen a massive rise in users and a more than 500 per cent increase in usage in the United States in the past few months. It recently passed 20 million users globally, marking a huge jump from the 9 million global users it had in September.  

“Subscriptions are the first step,” Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber told Wired last week in an interview. 

However, bets on paid subscription-based models have not paid off for other social media companies. 

Elon Musk has tried to increase paid subscriptions with X Premium and reduce the platform’s dependence on advertising revenue.

However, according to a report in October by app intelligence firm Appfigures, X has pulled in around $200 million (€190 million) in in-app purchase revenue across iOS and Android since the 2021 subscription launch, then called Twitter Blue. 

Bluesky’s CEO also recently hinted at a TechCrunch event that there could be other revenue efforts such as selling domain names, a marketplace of algorithms, and even potentially selling adverts.