Bluesky is Building a Payment Platform and Why Should We Care
Why are they even bothering with developing a payment infrastructure when they have many “social media” things to do?
Bluesky is the new kid in the town, or rather, I should say a rising star. It’s the platform that everyone suddenly started talking about.
But it was a social media app, right? Right? So why is it now building a payment platform? Is X too small a competitor that it wants to go head-to-head with Stripe and PayPal?
I re-discovered Bluesky after reading a story about it on Medium a couple of weeks ago, and I was like, hey now it IS something. I had used its app when it first came out. It was laggy, and honestly, it sucked.
I installed it as fast as I could just after creating an account and scrolling my home feed for a minute. I found no good reason to use it. I better use X, I thought.
Fast forward to the present day, Bluesky is making waves everywhere. From inviting scholars to share their academic writing to advertisers, and promising a better reach and return on their investments compared to other apps, this decentralised social media is doing everything.
Bluesky’s user base is on an exponential rise right now. On the best days, they are adding north of 1 million users in a single day. That’s a lot of people flocking onto Bluesky as if it were some gold rush.
A huge reason behind that is Elon Musk and what he’s doing at X, but still, it’s amazing how they have managed to grow at this pace almost organically. I mean, they don’t have a case like that of Threads where Mark is poking billions of accounts on Instagram to join Threads and yet facing a slowdown in user growth stats.
So why tap into payments with such a load already?
Building the best social network is a full-time job in itself. Most companies fail in the execution, and it’s more likely than ever with an exponential number of new accounts.
Starting from user verification to managing and removing explicit and bots account respectively, we are just scratching the surface. Branded as a decentralised social media that’s built upon the AT Protocol, there’s still a long way to go in making it a mainstream social media app.
So why get involved with payments, you ask?
In an interview with Buffer, Bluesky’s COO Rose Wang said that they are prioritising building their own payment platform.
An excerpt from the interview featured in The Verge notes:
“Where we want monetization to go is to align our incentives with our users, creators and developers. And so as they’re making more money, we should be making money, but if they’re not making money, we shouldn’t be making money. And so our goal is: let’s build a payment system so that it enables these payments to work on the app and across other apps on the ecosystem much easier. And then we’ll increase the volume of those transactions, and the creators and folks take home most of it, and we just take a percentage of the transaction fee.”
It sounds somewhat like Stripe and PayPal, doesn’t it? We make money when the creator makes money, and we take a teeny-tiny part of that as a form of transaction fee.
Users are clearly having a tough time understanding what the company wants to focus on in the near future.
One user commented: “I’m not really sure I like that development but to be honest Bluesky feels way too much like Twitter used to, so I really don’t know if I ever want to log into Bluesky ever again.” while another one talked about how they feel that Bluesky is giving them a vibe that it will shortly end up like X and Instagram.
On the other hand, some users are very enthusiastic and can’t wait to see how these developments turn out.
Legowerewolf titled account writes in the comment section of The Verge article: “Hm. It’ll be interesting to see how monetization and decentralization work together. I don’t think there’s a decentralized way to do money without reaching for cryptocurrencies, which many are (understandably) leery of.”
Let’s see how of if Bluesky will be able to pull off this payment platform integration and subscription model introduction to their app successfully.
It’s a show that we will all witness in 2025 after they showed phenomenal growth in user base in 2024.
Why should we care?
Monetising is as important for a creator as it is for the platform. If I am providing something of value, which I have created with blood, sweat, and tears, I’d want to get compensated for that.
Platforms know this very well. That’s why they want to integrate a seamless experience to reward you for providing value in their ecosystem. The best way to do that is to make it easier to facilitate transactions. It’s a win-win if you observe.
We as users get a revenue share, and they keep a minority stake (like YouTube), or charge a subscription fee (like X), or a combination of both. If Bluesky is able to add a payment processor to the mix, it could very well unlock a potential third (and most lucrative) income source.
It can outsource the payment technology to other companies too, just like Amazon did with AWS. What started with managing its own digital infrastructure is now the biggest bottom-line driver for their business.
There is a huge shift that’s happening in the social media space. More and more people are actively deciding which social media app they want to be on. They’re weighing the pros and cons. Creators are doing exactly the same, too.
If a social media platform, that’s built on an open protocol, that promises to not become an echo chamber and give you freedom, is booming at an unprecedented pace, we as writers and creatives need to pay heed.
Should we write on it? Should we market and build for the platform? — these are some valuable questions to ask at this point in time. And that’s precisely why we should care.