ændra.

Hi, I'm Ændra Rininsland, I'm a technologist working in newsmedia who curates the News and Trending News feeds in my free time as both a hobby and public service. They are currently the two most popular general focus feeds for news content on Bluesky. I spend a lot of time developing and curating the lists of orgs in my feeds to ensure they are a high quality source of news, and am planning to use the incredible wealth of tools offered by Graze to create variants of my feeds so that users can more easily find news relevant to them.

My feeds collectively receive anywhere from 110-120,000 daily average users (DAUs), with each refreshing the feed on average 9 times a day. I'm starting with a low CPM cost for advertisers and prioritising campaigns with a strong newsmedia-focus, that would be relevant to a general news-reading audience (I'm anticipating, for instance, news organisations wanting to promote deals on subscriptions).

I'm mainly wanting to monetise my feeds so I can place a portion of the promoted post revenue in a trust intended to fund 3rd party development on Bluesky, which I've begun setting up at @shoots.green. As a developer myself (I'm also the creator of both @xblock.aendra.dev and @moji.blue), I've long struggled with the question how the ongoing development of Bluesky's ecosystem will be sustained, particularly given how so much of the weight of community moderation typically falls on communities who are already struggling. I hope I can contribute through my fund to various initiatives intended to make the platform safer and more enjoyable to use, particularly for groups at risk as a result of the current political climate.

Note that I am doing this, along with Graze, purely independently from Bluesky PBC. To ensure feed users can differentiate between news items and promoted content, I am requesting all potential promoters to include the #promoted hashtag in their campaigns, which both fulfils this purpose and allows users to opt out of seeing promoted content — click or long-press on the hashtag when you see it for the option to hide posts containing it. My promoted post saturation level is 2%, meaning users see one promoted post per feed refresh. My hope is by giving users this freedom, while simultaneously making the promoted posts themselves informative and unobtrusive, users will remain opted in with the knowledge that doing so supports creators like me.