Bluesky as an Emerging Channel for Brand and Influencer Marketing

The short answer

Bluesky is a decentralized social network built on the AT Protocol, where accounts and content aren't locked to one company. As of August 2026 the platform has around 46 million registered users, but genuinely active usage has fallen sharply: from about 22.1 million monthly active users in Q4 2024 to about 10.7 million in Q2 2026 — a roughly 52% drop. Bluesky has no advertising product, creator fund, tipping feature or native subscriptions, so any use today is organic. The main growth lever is Starter Packs, not paid distribution.

What is Bluesky, structurally?

Bluesky started as an internal Twitter project in 2019, was spun out as an independent company in 2021, and opened to the public in February 2024 after an invite-only beta period. What structurally separates Bluesky from Threads, Reddit and X is the underlying technology: the AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol), which Bluesky itself describes as infrastructure in the spirit of an open protocol like HTTP, rather than a closed app owned by a single company. Per Bluesky's own description, that means users have a shared identity across the entire social internet — in principle, a user can switch between different apps built on the AT Protocol and keep their audience, content and followers, instead of being locked into one platform's account system. That's a fundamentally different architecture from Threads (requires an Instagram account), Reddit or X, where the account and following exist only inside that one platform.

Bluesky in numbers: registered users vs. genuinely active users

It's important to separate two different figures when assessing Bluesky as a channel. Per Bluesky's own public numbers, cited by TechCrunch (August 11, 2026), the platform now has nearly 46 million registered users. But registered users aren't the same as active users, and here the picture looks markedly different: per the same TechCrunch article, citing Similarweb data, Bluesky's mobile monthly active users fell to 10.4 million in June 2026, down 27.2% year-over-year. Daily active usage dropped even more sharply: mobile daily active users fell 25.6% year-over-year in July 2026, to around 3 million.

Over a longer stretch the decline is even clearer: from Q4 2024 to Q2 2026, monthly active users fell from around 22.1 million to around 10.7 million — a drop of roughly 52%, per the same source. That's a genuine finding worth highlighting for a brand: the often-cited "46 million users" headline covers a platform where the actual active audience is under a quarter of that figure, and has been declining since roughly the end of 2024. That doesn't mean Bluesky is irrelevant — but it does mean a registered-user count alone is a poor basis for judging the platform's real reach.

Bluesky in Denmark

Bluesky's largest growth wave to date came in November 2024, when many new users — including in Denmark — signed up, coinciding with a widely reported wave of users leaving X after the US presidential election and X's own policy changes. Bluesky doesn't publish which platform new users came from, so this connection rests on broad, contemporaneous media coverage rather than figures from Bluesky itself.

For the Danish market specifically, Bluesky's own press office told the trade publication Journalisten (November 19, 2024) that at least 40,000 Danish profiles had been created since November 3, 2024 — with Bluesky's own caveat that the figure "could be an underestimation." The outlet Overskrift, which uses a combination of automation and manual review to filter out bots and fake profiles (per its own disclosed methodology, updated February 2025), arrived at a lower figure: around 20,000 active Danish profiles as of January 2025. The gap between the two numbers is a useful example in its own right: a platform-reported "profiles created" figure and an independently methodology-disclosed "active profiles" figure can differ by roughly a factor of two, and it's worth asking which of the two a piece of marketing material is actually citing.

Several curated Danish Starter Packs exist on the platform today, targeting Danish journalists, members of the Folketing, ministers and researchers — a sign that the Danish user base, like the international one, skews heavily toward media, politics and research rather than a broad consumer base. That's relevant when judging whether Bluesky is the right place for a given campaign: the audience composition resembles LinkedIn's early user base more than a broad Instagram or TikTok audience.

No ads, no creator fund — what does that mean for a brand?

Unlike Threads and Reddit, Bluesky has no advertising product as of writing (August 2026), and also no creator fund, no ad-revenue share, no tipping feature and no native paid subscriptions. That isn't an accident. Bluesky's then-CEO, Jay Graber, told TechCrunch (December 5, 2024): "We can't enshittify the network with ads" — a clear signal that ads can't simply be bolted on if doing so degrades the user experience. At the same time, Graber didn't rule out ads permanently: asked whether Bluesky would always stay ad-free, Graber said "I don't think that's necessarily true," pointing to a more user-intent-driven ad format — for example, in search results — as a possible, less disruptive model, rather than ads in the feed itself.

A genuine, dated finding is that Bluesky changed its top leadership in the middle of this trajectory: on March 9, 2026, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO and moved into the role of Chief Innovation Officer, per Bluesky's own blog post the same day. Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic (WordPress.com's parent company) and a partner at venture firm True Ventures, joined as interim CEO while the board searches for a permanent successor. Graber explained the change by saying Bluesky, as a more mature company, needs "a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution," while Graber personally thrives most on building new things. For a brand, the point isn't who leads Bluesky — it's that a platform going through a leadership change, a declining active-user count and a still-unsettled monetization strategy is a platform in a visible transition period, not one whose future commercial model can be predicted with confidence.

Starter Packs: the main growth mechanic on Bluesky

Because there's no paid distribution on Bluesky, organic discovery is everything that's available — and that's where Starter Packs play a central role. Per Bluesky's own blog post (bsky.social, launched June 26, 2024), a Starter Pack is a curated, shareable collection of accounts and feeds that any user can create and share. A pack can hold up to 150 recommended accounts and up to 3 custom feeds, and comes with a shareable link and QR code that can be sent by text, posted to other social platforms, or shared directly on Bluesky itself. A new user can join the platform directly through a Starter Pack and receive the creator's recommendations as a starting point, which the user can then adjust themselves. No documented follower-count requirement for creating a Starter Pack was found — the feature is open to any account.

For a brand, that means the most realistic "marketing" action on Bluesky today isn't buying an ad — it's getting included in, or building, a relevant Starter Pack, either in partnership with a creator who's already built trust in a niche, or by curating a pack of relevant accounts within the brand's own field, as a form of content marketing aimed at the platform's own discovery flow.

Custom feeds and the AT Protocol: why this is structurally different

Beyond Starter Packs, custom feeds are the other central discovery mechanic. Because Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol, any developer can build their own feed algorithm and make it available to other users as an optional tab in the app — examples from Bluesky's own documentation include feeds built around "Quiet Posters" (posts from a user's less active connections), a science-focused feed, or a "Catch Up" feed of the most popular posts from the last 24 hours. That stands in sharp contrast to Threads, Reddit and X, where one algorithm (or a small number of centrally controlled variants) governs what users see.

The second structural difference is account portability. Because identity and data are, in principle, tied to the underlying protocol rather than to the Bluesky app itself, a project like Skylight (named in Bluesky's own description of the ecosystem) can, in theory, let a user switch between different AT Protocol apps while keeping their audience, content and followers. That's relevant in the context of platform risk more broadly — see reducing platform risk in influencer marketing — because it, in theory, reduces one specific form of platform risk (an entire audience being locked to one company's account system). It's worth being honest, though, that this portability is still young, developing technology in practice, and Bluesky itself is far from the dominant app in the AT Protocol ecosystem measured by active users.

Bluesky compared with Threads and Reddit

	Bluesky	Threads	Reddit
Ownership model	Decentralized (AT Protocol), non-profit-affiliated PBC	Owned by Meta	Owned by Reddit, Inc.
Advertising product	None as of August 2026 — not ruled out for the future	Yes, rolled out globally from January 26, 2026	Yes, a mature product with several formats
Direct payout to creators from the platform	No creator fund or revenue share	No active program in 2026 (earlier bonus program ended April 2025)	No built-in creator payout — collaborations happen outside the platform
Main discovery mechanic	Starter Packs + custom feeds	Followers + Meta's algorithm	Upvotes/downvotes within each subreddit
Account portability	Yes, in principle (AT Protocol)	No — requires an Instagram account	No — tied to the Reddit account
Official disclosure tool for paid content	None found documented	"Paid partnership" labelling since Oct 2023	Brand Affiliate tag (covers posts and comments)

The point of the table isn't that one channel is "the right one" — it's that these three platforms solve fundamentally different problems for a brand in 2026, and that Bluesky is today the only one of the three where paid distribution doesn't exist as an option at all.

Two ways brands can actually use Bluesky today

Because there's no paid advertising product, using Bluesky today looks more like content marketing than media buying:

• Organic presence and participation in relevant Starter Packs. Getting included in, or building, a Starter Pack within a given niche can deliver real, ongoing visibility to an audience that has already actively chosen to follow that topic.
• Partnering with a creator already established on the platform. The same logic as ordinary influencer marketing applies here — a creator with an established Bluesky following can mention or recommend a product organically, paid directly by the brand, with no Bluesky-specific payment system involved.

Both models are organic. As of writing, there's no way to boost or pay for extra reach on a Bluesky post — which clearly separates the platform from both Threads and Reddit.

Disclosure rules apply on Bluesky too

Even though Bluesky has no documented, built-in disclosure tool for paid content, that doesn't change the Danish and EU disclosure baseline — covered in full in influencer marketing disclosure rules in Denmark and the EU. The requirement is medium-agnostic: what matters is whether there's a commercial relationship behind the content, not whether the platform itself provides a labelling tool. Without a built-in "paid partnership" button, responsibility for clear, correct disclosure falls fully on the creator and the brand themselves — for example, with clear text like "ad" or "advertisement for" directly in the post, the same wording already documented as holding up on other text-based platforms.

Decision framework

IF your target audience genuinely overlaps with Bluesky's — media, research, politics, tech → an organic presence and a Starter Pack partnership can deliver real value, even without paid distribution.

IF you need predictable, paid, scalable reach within a given timeframe → Bluesky can't deliver that the way Threads or Reddit can today, because no advertising product exists.

IF the decision depends on a large, growing active audience → be aware that active-user figures have fallen sharply since the end of 2024, even though the registered-user count keeps climbing.

IF you want to reduce long-term dependence on one large platform's account system → the AT Protocol's account portability is a genuine, if still immature, attempt to solve exactly that problem — worth watching, not worth building an entire strategy around yet.

Worked example

The figures below are hypothetical and illustrate only how a brand might think about the value of a Starter Pack collaboration on Bluesky — they are not a documented conversion rate or an industry average, and this is not a real Make Influence customer case.

A Danish B2B brand pays a well-regarded expert on Bluesky DKK 3,000 to include the brand's own account in a Starter Pack aimed at that expert's niche, plus one post linking to the pack. Assume the pack is hypothetically followed by 400 new accounts over one month (a hypothetical, undocumented figure used only to illustrate the calculation), and that 5% of them click through to the brand's website via a unique tracking link (20 clicks). If 2 of the 20 turn into a lead, and the brand historically closes 25% of its leads at an average order value of DKK 12,000, that's an expected value of 0.5 × 12,000 = DKK 6,000 from a collaboration that cost DKK 3,000 — with no media spend, because the entire reach was organic. As with any other channel, a unique tracking link is required to separate the result from other channels — see how influencer tracking actually works.

Common mistakes

• Confusing registered users with active users. The 46 million registered users cover an active audience under a quarter that size, and one that's been shrinking since the end of 2024.
• Expecting paid distribution. There's no advertising product on Bluesky today — all reach has to come organically, via followers, Starter Packs or custom feeds.
• Assuming Bluesky has the same broad, consumer-facing audience as Instagram or TikTok. Both internationally and in Denmark, the audience today skews heavily toward media, politics and tech.
• Skipping disclosure because the platform doesn't provide a labelling tool itself. The Danish and EU rules apply regardless of whether the platform has a built-in button for it.
• Building a long-term strategy on a leadership and monetization layer that's still in motion. The March 2026 leadership change and the unsettled stance on ads mean the platform's commercial direction can't be predicted with confidence today.

Make Influence's operational perspective

In Make Influence's experience, Bluesky isn't yet a channel Danish brands themselves request as part of an ordinary influencer deal, and that naturally follows from the platform having neither paid distribution nor a broad consumer audience in Denmark yet. Our recommendation is to treat Bluesky as relevant for brands with a genuine, professional target audience in media, politics, research or tech — not as a general channel on par with Instagram or TikTok — and to prioritize an organic, long-term partnership with an already-established creator on the platform over expecting fast, paid results the platform can't deliver in its current form.

FAQ

Can you buy ads on Bluesky?

No, not as of August 2026. The platform has no advertising product, but Bluesky's former CEO hasn't ruled out ads permanently — a possible future model is ads tied to search results rather than the feed itself.

Does Bluesky pay creators directly?

No. There's no creator fund, revenue share, tipping feature or paid subscriptions on Bluesky. All of a creator's earnings have to come from outside the platform, the same as an ordinary brand deal.

How many people genuinely use Bluesky?

Around 46 million are registered, but the genuinely active audience is far smaller and has been shrinking: from about 22.1 million monthly active users at the end of 2024 to about 10.7 million in Q2 2026.

What is a Starter Pack?

A curated, shareable collection of up to 150 accounts and 3 custom feeds that any user can create and share via a link or QR code. It's currently the platform's main organic growth mechanic, because paid distribution doesn't exist.

Do Danish disclosure rules apply on Bluesky?

Yes. The rules are medium-agnostic and apply regardless of whether the platform itself provides a labelling tool — no documented, built-in disclosure tool was found on Bluesky.

What about Threads or Reddit?

Both have a real advertising product in 2026, unlike Bluesky — but none of the three platforms pays creators directly for content. See Threads as an influencer marketing channel and Reddit as an emerging channel for brand and influencer marketing.

What about X (Twitter)?

X is the outlier among the four: unlike Bluesky, Threads and Reddit, X has a genuine organic creator-payout program — Original Content Rewards, replacing Creator Revenue Sharing from September 2026 — though it still has no official creator marketplace, the same gap Bluesky has. See X (Twitter) as a channel for brand and influencer marketing in 2026.

What about RedNote (Xiaohongshu)?

RedNote is structurally very different again: a Chinese hybrid of search, social posts and e-commerce, with a real account-setup access barrier (typically a Chinese trademark and agency mediation) and independently documented data-security findings that don't apply to Bluesky's fully organic, ad-free model. See RedNote (Xiaohongshu) as an emerging channel for brand and influencer marketing.