Bluesky Bets on Payments, Not Ads, to Fund the Network

Bluesky will introduce payments within the coming months, its first concrete step toward making money without advertising. CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang announced the plan Thursday on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, framing it as infrastructure for commerce and fundraising that already happens on the decentralized network.

"People are actually selling things, fundraising very successfully, supporting each other on the network," Schneider said. "We want to make that easier, and the way we're going to do this is if you see something on the network that you like and support, you can support that monetarily, and we want to do it in a way that works for Bluesky and for all the other apps out there as well, so that it works across the entire network."

The promise is cross-network payments. The caveat: neither executive gave a launch date, a fee structure, or revenue targets on stage.

Who is running Bluesky now?

Schneider, the former CEO of Automattic, took the top job in March after longtime CEO Jay Graber stepped down. He said the reaction to his appointment surprised him — some users joked it marked the beginning of the end for the platform, reflecting fears that a leadership change would bring unwanted shifts.

Schneider acknowledged that users can leave for another platform if Bluesky ships features they dislike. He called that reality a check that keeps the leadership team accountable as monetization approaches.

That exit option is structural, not rhetorical. Bluesky's decentralization means the company cannot lock users in — a constraint that cuts both ways when the business needs revenue.

What is the alternative to advertising?

Wang rejected the assumption that ads are the only viable social-network business model.

"I think there's a story around monetization that feels like advertising is the inevitable thing we have to do that will ruin the network," Wang said. She pointed to Schneider's track record at WordPress Automatic, where she said he "built a $10 billion business where a billion of it goes back to the parent company and the rest of it goes to the ecosystem."

Read that split carefully: roughly nine-tenths of the value stayed with the ecosystem, not the parent. Bluesky is implicitly promising a similar ratio — though no figures for its own platform were offered.

Wang also cited Bluesky's status as a Public Benefit Corporation, which she said puts the company's mission at the center of its business strategy.

"Yes, we need to make money, but because of our infrastructure, we cannot lock people in," Wang said. "And so the thing that really matters for us is the people who are creating value on the networks these days are the ones who are getting the value that is coming in or the money that's coming in. And I kind of think of it as like feudal society where we're working for a few landlords and they dictate everything, and then we have to pay up our dues as tariffs."

In plain words: the pitch is that creators, not platform owners, capture the money flowing through the network.

How big is the ambition?

Bluesky says its goal extends beyond payments. The company wants users to own their digital identities and control their networks, inside a more open internet where revenue flows directly to the people who generate it.

"First, we'll start with payments, but I think it's about disrupting the actual infrastructure layer, which is what we're doing, and not just building another app," Wang said.

That is a large claim for a company that has yet to ship its first revenue feature. Disrupting infrastructure is harder than launching a tip button, and Wang offered no timeline beyond "first, payments."

The test arrives with the payments launch in the coming months: whether users treat Bluesky monetization as an exception to the ad-driven norm, or as the first unwanted change that pushes them to leave.

By Olivia Hart