Bluesky plans to roll out payment features in coming months as its first major revenue initiative, eschewing the advertising model that dominates social networks.
CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang detailed the strategy Thursday at TechCrunch Disrupt, noting that users already conduct commerce and fundraising on the decentralized platform. The company will build tools to streamline these transactions across its network and other applications built on top of it.
"Users are selling things, fundraising very successfully, supporting each other on the network," Schneider said. "We're going to make that easier."
The move reflects Schneider's playbook from Automattic, where he built WordPress into a $10 billion business with $1 billion flowing back to the parent company and the remainder distributed across its ecosystem of developers and hosts. Wang framed this as the inverse of ad-dependent social networks: instead of extracting value from creators to sell ads, Bluesky routes revenue directly to those generating content.
Wang pushed back on the assumption that advertising is inevitable. "The common narrative is that advertising is the inevitable thing we have to do that will ruin the network," she said. "We don't believe that's true."
The business model hinges on Bluesky's structure as a Public Benefit Corporation and its open protocol architecture. Unlike Facebook or X, where the parent company owns the network graph, Bluesky's decentralized design means users control their identities and can migrate between applications. Wang described the difference in stark terms: legacy social platforms operate as "feudal societies where we're working for a few landlords," while Bluesky aims to let creators retain the value they generate.
The strategy carries execution risk. Payments infrastructure is operationally complex and subject to regulatory scrutiny. Bluesky must also convince users to actively support creators through direct payments rather than passively consuming algorithmically-served content—a shift in user behavior no ad-free social network has yet achieved at scale.
