The audience editor for Guardian Australia has said that new social network Bluesky delivered more referral traffic to theguardian.com in its first week on the platform than X has in any week in 2024.
The editor, Dave Earley, added that Bluesky successor had also delivered at least twice as many visits as Meta’s microblogging platform Threads.
The Guardian joined Bluesky a week after it announced it would no longer post to X, which it said had become “a toxic social media platform” that played “a diminished role in promoting our work” under current owner Elon Musk.
The same day Earley posted about The Guardian’s Bluesky traffic Matt Karolian, the vice president of platforms at The Boston Globe, made similar remarks disclosing that the US newsbrand was seeing three times more traffic from Bluesky than Threads.
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More significantly, Karolian said, Bluesky was also driving “4.5 times more conversions to paying digital subscribers” than Threads.
Bluesky offers similar functionality to X but a simpler experience which gives them more control over what they see. So far Bluesky appears to have far less misinformation amd commercial content than X.
X founder Elon Musk has become a dominant voice on his own platform and the fact that he is not on Bluesky is seen as a plus by many users of the platform.
The Guardian’s Earley said in a post on Bluesky: “Traffic from Bluesky’s @bsky.app to @theguardian.com is already 2x that of Threads In its first week on the platform & with 300k followers, Bluesky traffic from @theguardian.com posts is already higher than it was from TwX in any week in 2024, where the account had 10.8m followers, but while Bluesky traffic is already 2x that of Threads, that’s on a straight l.threads.net vs bsky.app referral comparison. BUT! 75-80% of tracked referral from owned Bluesky account posts is NOT being attributed to @bsky.app, so I’m certain organic traffic would be undercounting by that much as well…
“By which I mean, I’m pretty sure traffic from @bsky.app to @theguardian.com is *significantly* higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads This post brought to you by a reply to @mkarolian.bsky.social on Threads, where it has had just 105 engagements, as opposed to the 18k+ here.”
Several other publishers and audience professionals have reported similar trends at their own outlets.
Luke Plunkett, a co-founder of independent tech outlet Aftermath, wrote that its ratio of Twitter to Bluesky referrals “has gone from 9:1 to 3:1 to just under 2:1 in like three months”.
Independent journalist Erin Reed, who covers trans news on her Substack Erin In The Morning, said Bluesky was beating both Threads and X for referrals to her site.
The publisher of online non-profit news outlet EUobserver, Alejandro Tauber, posted that in the prior week the site had received 3,800 unique visitors from Bluesky, where it has 3,300 followers, and 1,320 uniques from X, where it has 203,000 followers.
And Martin Holland, the editor of German IT publisher Heise, published a graph showing the traffic from all three platforms — plus fellow defederated platform Mastodon — that indicated Bluesky was set to imminently overtake X as a traffic source.
Bluesky saw account creations surge last week and now boasts around 23 million users total — some way short of the 275 million monthly users claimed by Threads and the 260 million daily users Elon Musk claimed X had in November 2022.
But the new arrivals have nonetheless been followed by a wave of news publishers seeking to reach Bluesky’s surging audience.
On X, meanwhile, Elon Musk appeared to confirm over the weekend that his platform decreases visibility for any tweets that contain a link, having implied this was the case as long as a year ago.
Even in its heyday Twitter was never a major part of the referral traffic mix for most news publishers, rarely accounting for more than 2% of visits according to previous Press Gazette reporting.
As publisher visibility diminishes on X, and with Meta seemingly unwilling to make Threads a breaking news destination, surging Bluesky traffic raises the possibility the platform may become professional journalism’s microblogging site of choice.
Responding to Earley’s post, Bluesky chief operating officer Rose Wang wrote: “We want Bluesky to be a great home for journalists, publishers, and creators. Unlike other platforms, we don’t de-promote your links.
“Post all the links you want — Bluesky is a lobby to the open web.”
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