Guardian audience editor says Bluesky already generates more traffic than X

The Bluesky and X apps are displayed on the screen of an iPhone, illustrating a story that Bluesky is already sending more traffic to The Guardian than — Bluesky and X applications are displayed on the screen of an iPhone. Photo: Koshiro K/Shutterstock

The audience editor for Tutor Australia said new social network Bluesky generated more referral traffic to theguardian.com in its first week on the platform than X had generated in any week in 2024.

Editor Dave Earley added that Bluesky’s successor also made at least twice as many visits as MetaThreads, the microblogging platform of .

The Guardian joined Bluesky for a week after announcing that he would no longer publish on Xwhich he says has become “a toxic social media platform” that plays “a diminished role in promoting our work” under the current leadership of owner Elon Musk.

The same day, Earley job on the Guardian’s Bluesky traffic Matt Karolian, vice president of platforms at the Boston Globe, made similar remarks revealing that the American news brand was seeing three times more traffic from Bluesky than from Threads.

More importantly, Karolian said, Bluesky was also generating “4.5 times more conversions to paid digital subscribers” than Threads.

Bluesky offers similar features to X but a simpler experience that gives them more control over what they see. So far, Bluesky appears to have much less misinformation and 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 of the platform’s users.

The Guardian’s Earley said in an article about Bluesky: “Traffic from Bluesky @bsky.app has @theguardian.com is already 2x that of Threads. During its first week on the platform and with 300,000 subscribers, Bluesky’s traffic @theguardian.com posts are already higher than TwX’s in any week of 2024, where the account had 10.8 million followers, but while Bluesky’s traffic is already 2x that of Threads, it’s on a straight line. l.threads.net against bsky.app reference comparison. BUT! 75-80% of referrals tracked from Bluesky account posts are NOT attributed to @bsky.appso I am sure that organic traffic would also be underestimated by the same amount…

“By that I mean, I’m pretty sure traffic coming from @bsky.app has @theguardian.com is *significantly* higher than the very obvious 2x that of Threads. This message is brought to you by a response to @mkarolian.bsky.social on Threads, where he only had 105 engagements, compared to 18,000+ here.

Several other publishers and audience professionals have reported similar trends in their own media outlets.

Luke Plunkett, co-founder of independent technology outlet Consequenceswrote this its Twitter referral ratio compared to Bluesky “went from 9:1 to 3:1 to just under 2:1 in about three months.”

Independent journalist Erin Reed, who covers trans news on her Substack Erin in the morning, said Bluesky was beating Threads and X for referrals to its site.

The publisher of a nonprofit online news outlet European Union observerAlexander Tauber, job that the previous week, the site had received 3,800 unique visitors from Bluesky, where it has 3,300 subscribers, and 1,320 unique visitors from X, where it has 203,000 subscribers.

And Martin Holland, editor-in-chief of the German IT publisher Heisepublished a graph showing the traffic of the three platforms – as well as the defederate platform Mastodon – which indicated that Bluesky was close to overtaking X as a traffic source.

Bluesky saw account creations increase last week and now has around 23 million total users, well below the 275 million monthly users. claimed by Threads and Elon Musk’s 260 million daily users claimed X did so in November 2022.

But the new arrivals were nevertheless followed by a wave of press publishers looking to reach Bluesky’s growing audience.

On X, meanwhile, Elon Musk appeared confirm over the weekend that its platform reduced the visibility of all tweets containing a link, having implied that this was the case already a year ago.

Even at its peak, Twitter never played a major role in driving referral traffic for most news publishers. rarely accounting for more than 2% of visits according to previous Press Gazette reports.

As publisher visibility decreases on X, and with Meta apparently doesn’t want to make Threads a breaking news destinationBluesky’s increased traffic raises the possibility that the platform could become the microblogging site of choice for professional journalism.

In response to Earley’s post, Rose Wang, Bluesky’s chief operating officer, wrote: “We want Bluesky to be a great home for journalists, editors and creators. Unlike other platforms, we do not de-promote your links.

“Publish all the links you want: Bluesky is a lobby for the open web. »

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