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Clear skies, ready for takeoff

Bluesky engagement seems to be punching way above its weight

While Meta pushes every Instagram user to Threads and X tries to shore up a disintegrating user base, the plucky indie social network is picking up steam because people actually seem to be using it.

Jon Keegan

11/29/24 10:38AM

It’s a crazy time for news publishers trying to share their stories on social media. Just a few years ago, Twitter and Facebook were the two big platforms to reach a huge audience of social-media users. Since Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and transformation into X, a mass migration of users has fled the platform, and the social-media landscape has splintered into pieces. Now, in addition to X, there is Meta’s Threads and Twitter spin-off Bluesky. But something interesting is happening with audience engagement on Bluesky.

Among this group of text-based platforms, X is still a juggernaut, with 535 million users overall. Both Threads and Bluesky have been adding over a million users per day recently, but Threads’ 275 million users dwarfs Bluesky’s 23 million.

Neglecting news

Meta has stepped back from positioning itself as a source for news, and across Instagram, Facebook, and Threads, news content does not get the same algorithmic boost that it used to. Elon Musk this week appeared to confirm that posts on X with links off the platform are deprioritized, which he referred to as “lazy linking”:

Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2024

But over on Bluesky, news has no such algorithmic speed bump. Users have been noticing that while Bluesky’s audience is a mere sliver of X and Threads’ user bases, it has been delivering as much engagement as the bigger platforms, and in some cases eclipsing them. “Engagement” refers to how much users interact with any given piece of content, measured in likes, replies, or reposting a story.

At least anecdotally, medium-sized to large publishers have begun to report that internal data gives Bluesky a pretty remarkable edge.

bluesky-bostonglobe.com — @mkarolian.bsky.social

Let’s take a look at how engagement varies from platform to platform for some big news stories published by The New York Times, CNN, and The Wall Street Journal. But first, let’s look at the audience size for these publishers on each platform.

Engagement per million users

We picked three recent stories that were at least a day old, covered a few different topics, and were published by the official accounts for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and CNN on X, Threads, and Bluesky.

To control for the vastly different size of the platforms, we assigned each story an “engagement per million users” score:

`(Likes + reposts + replies) / (total number of users on platform / 1 million) = engagement per million users.`

Of course, there are some limitations to this analysis. This experiment doesn’t control for the many, many variables that affect user-engagement numbers. For example, it doesn’t account for the weight of each type of engagement (a “like” is easier than a reply). Also, this does not account for the different political vibe of each platform, which could lead to certain stories getting very different reactions on different platforms. But when you plot out these scores, you do see much more engagement for the same stories on Bluesky.

Getting a consistent measure of active users on each platform is tricky. Using monthly active users as the devisor in this equation would be a more accurate way to measure this engagement rate, but we don’t have hard numbers for each platform. X says that it has 535 million “global monetizable monthly active users,” but Musk recently said that there are about 300 million daily active users. So even if that is accurate, X numbers might look close to Threads, as Meta says they have 275 million monthly active users.

Given that these are still generally similar orders of magnitude to overall user numbers, plugging in those estimates doesn’t meaningfully change what the chart shows: Bluesky sure looks hot right now.

Another possible explanation is that because Bluesky is new, it is probably just full of more fresh, engaged users. After all, X is carrying 18 years’ worth of users, and as a private company it doesn’t have to share as much detail about its users with regulators and investors.

News publishers are eager to find platforms that can get their stories in front of readers without fighting opaque algorithmic rules, so this increased engagement may lure more publishers to the platform.

With an eye on Bluesky’s skyrocketing growth, the other platforms may be taking notice. Just last week, Meta rolled out a flurry of features like allowing a non-algorithmic “followers” feed to be the default, and rolling out “starter packs,” which have been hugely popular on Bluesky.

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Rani Molla10h

Apple to pay Google $1 billion a year for access to AI model for Siri

Apple plans to pay Google about $1 billion a year to use the search giant’s AI model for Siri, Bloomberg reports. Google’s model — at 1.2 trillion parameters — is way bigger than Apple’s current models.

The deal aims to help the iPhone maker improve its lagging AI efforts, powering a new Siri slated to come out this spring.

Apple had previously been considering using OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, but decided in the end to go with Google as it works toward improving its own internal models. Google, which makes a much less widely sold phone, the Pixel, has succeeded in bringing consumer AI to smartphone users where Apple has failed.

Google’s antitrust ruling in September helped safeguard the two companies’ partnerships — including the more than $20 billion Google pays Apple each year to be the default search engine on its devices — as long as they aren’t exclusive.

Apple Plans to Use 1.2 Trillion Parameter Google Gemini Model to Run New Siri

Rani Molla10h

Netflix creates new made-up metric for advertisers

It’s not quite WeWork’s community-adjusted EBITDA, but it’s also not quite a real number: Netflix announced today that it has 190 million “monthly active viewers” for its lower-cost ad-supported tiers. The company came up with the metric by measuring the number of subscribers who’ve watched “at least 1 minute of ads on Netflix per month” and multiplying that by what its research assumes is the number of people in that household.

It builds on Netflix’s previous attempt at measuring ad viewership with monthly active users, which is the number of profiles that have watched ads (94 million as of May). The MAV measurement, of course, is a lot bigger, and bigger numbers are more attractive to advertisers, who are spending more and more on streaming platforms.

“After speaking to our partners, we know that what they want most is an accurate, clear, and transparent representation of who their ads are reaching,” Netflix President of Advertising Amy Reinhard explained in a press release. “Our move to viewers means we can give a more comprehensive count of how many people are actually on the couch, enjoying our can’t-miss series, films, games, and live events with friends and family.”

Netflix last reported its long-followed and more easily understood paid membership numbers at the beginning of the year, when it crossed 300 million.

Netflix’s Third Season of Ads and a Look Ahead at What's Next - About Netflix

Netflix last reported its long-followed and more easily understood paid membership numbers at the beginning of the year, when it crossed 300 million.

Rani Molla12h

Ahead of Musk’s pay package vote, Tesla’s board says they can’t make him work there full time

Ahead of Tesla’s CEO compensation vote at its annual shareholder meeting tomorrow, The Wall Street Journal did a deep dive into how Elon Musk, who stands to gain $1 trillion if he stays at Tesla and hits a number of milestones, spends his time.

Like a similar piece from The New York Times in September, this one has a lot of fun details. Read it all, but here are some to tide you over:

Musk spent so much time at xAI this summer that he held meetings there with Tesla employees.
He personally oversaw the design of a sexy chatbot named Ani, who sports pigtails and skimpy clothes and for whom “employees were compelled to turn over their biometric data” to train.
The chatbot, which users can ask to “change into lingerie or fantasize about a romantic encounter with them,” has helped boost user numbers, which are still way lower than ChatGPT’s.
Executives and board members have told top investors in the past few weeks that they can’t make Musk work at Tesla full time. Board Chair Robyn Denholm explained that in his free time, Musk “likes to create companies, and they’re not necessarily Tesla companies.”

Tesla Is Obsessed With Musk’s Pay Package. Musk Is Obsessed With AI.

Like a similar piece from The New York Times in September, this one has a lot of fun details. Read it all, but here are some to tide you over:

Musk spent so much time at xAI this summer that he held meetings there with Tesla employees.
He personally oversaw the design of a sexy chatbot named Ani, who sports pigtails and skimpy clothes and for whom “employees were compelled to turn over their biometric data” to train.
The chatbot, which users can ask to “change into lingerie or fantasize about a romantic encounter with them,” has helped boost user numbers, which are still way lower than ChatGPT’s.
Executives and board members have told top investors in the past few weeks that they can’t make Musk work at Tesla full time. Board Chair Robyn Denholm explained that in his free time, Musk “likes to create companies, and they’re not necessarily Tesla companies.”

Jon Keegan13h

Motion Picture Association to Meta: Stop saying Instagram teen content is “PG-13”

In October, Meta announced that its updated Instagram Teen Accounts would by default limit content to the “PG-13” rating.

The Motion Picture Association, which created the film rating standard, was not happy about Meta’s use of the rating, and sent the company a cease and desist letter, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal.

The letter from MPA’s law firm reportedly said the organization worked for decades to earn the public’s trust in the rating system, and it does not want Meta’s AI-powered content moderation failures to blow back on its work:

“Any dissatisfaction with Meta’s automated classification will inevitably cause the public to question the integrity of the MPA’s rating system.”

Meta told the WSJ that it never claimed or implied the content on Instagram Teen Accounts would be certified by the MPA.

Exclusive | Motion Picture Trade Group Pans Instagram’s Use of ‘PG-13’ With Cease and Desist

“Any dissatisfaction with Meta’s automated classification will inevitably cause the public to question the integrity of the MPA’s rating system.”

Meta told the WSJ that it never claimed or implied the content on Instagram Teen Accounts would be certified by the MPA.

Rani Molla15h

Dan Ives expects “overwhelming shareholder approval” of Tesla CEO pay package

Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives, like prediction markets, thinks Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $1 trillion pay package will receive “overwhelming shareholder approval” at the company’s annual shareholder meeting Thursday afternoon. The Tesla bull, like the Tesla board, has maintained that approval of the performance-based pay package is integral to keeping Musk at the helm of the company, which in turn is integral to the success of the company. Ives is also confident that investors will back the proposal allowing Tesla to invest in another of Musk’s companies, xAI.

“We expect shareholders to show overwhelming support tomorrow for Musk and the xAI stake further turning Tesla into an AI juggernaut with the autonomous and robotics future on the horizon,” Ives wrote in a note this morning.

The compensation package has received pushback, including from Tesla’s sixth-biggest institutional investor, Norway’s Norges Bank Investment Management, and from proxy adviser Institutional Shareholder Services.

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