Field notes from the first large scale sponsored content campaign on Bluesky
Bluesky is ushering in an unprecedented opportunity to revisit some of the fundamental rules of social platforms. As discussed before, we take that opportunity to revisit the core incentive structures of online ecosystems seriously. In our view, the most load-bearing mistake of legacy social media was to centralize the decision-making of how content gets distributed to users, more commonly reviled as "The Algorithm". To make a better internet this time around, we have to revisit what that means, and who benefits from it, in a fundamental way.
That's why we're building a very different economic arrangement with Graze. In our monetization announcement, we shared a radical re-working of how ads work in social media. Instead of The Platform building The Algorithm, and capturing 100% of the value of deciding who sees what (and what ads they see alongside the organic content), we are continuing the radical delegation of responsibility and power to users by letting our users decide what ads, if any ads at all, appear in feeds they operate. By wresting editorial and distributional control from any central actor, we believe we can make a more humane yet sustainable alternative to legacy social media.
In that effort, we're excited to share results from the first large scale test of our sponsored content platform. For 24 hours starting 9am on January 7th, we ran a sponsored post from our Graze official account on @Aendra.com's Verified News feed. During that time, our post would appear randomly interspersed on the first page of results on every requests for that period of time. Contained in that post is a brief note explaining that Graze powers the news feed, and we included a link to our site. We had created the post several weeks prior, and did not promote it anywhere else for several weeks preceding the test with Aendra to establish a baseline clickthrough to a uniquely identifiable URL. We were able to confirm that without promotion, 0 people would visit that URL on a typical day.
During the sponsorship campaign, the post was shown to users 463,704 times to 106,658 unique logged in users. In that window of time, we received 227 visitors who visited 347 pages with an average of 33 seconds on site. These metrics are in line with typical display ad / low-relevance converstion rates according to several measures. During this campaign, Aendra received $100 in turn. Most importantly, after careful review, we found that not a single complaint was registered either at Aendra or at Graze because of the obvious sponsored post. We believe that this effectively proves that not only are sponsored posts possible and efficacious on Bluesky, they are also not received negatively by the community in a categorical way.
As a result of this and several other early tests, we believe that we can roll out this new feature in the coming days. Soon, we will have a Stripe connect portal that will allow you to directly propose sponsored posts to feed operators, accept those proposals for your own feeds, and start being paid for the hard work of creating great content that people want to see. We also believe that this inversion of the traditional economic structure will result in a much better, much more sustainable version of the internet - one where people in their local communities decide how best to do the work of creating great curated content while not being exploited by the platforms that depend on that labor. We hope that you'll join us on this journey!