Bluesky Challenges Threads and X for Social Media Dominance | Pivot

... Blue Sky's growth doesn't appear to be stopping, with the platform crossing more than 21 million users. Keeps adding a million users a day, while the Threads has five times more daily active users than Blue Sky ahead of the election. That lead has now been reduced to 1.5 times, according, according to SimilarWeb. So people are really using it. Meta, uh, now seems to be feeling the heat, introducing new features suddenly. Oh, competition brings innovation and copying, including custom feeds around topics or people, mimicking Blue Sky's capabilities. Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, seemed to downplay Blue Sky numbers, sharing that Threads has more than 50 million signups in November alone. Agreed. Threads had been seeing a million new users a day for the last three months. Agreed. But it's very exciting that a young... that a small little, little thing is doing really well. Um, Blue Sky's financials. Blue Sky was initially launched as a spinoff of Twitter under Jack Dorsey. The company has since cut ties with him. Th- that was interesting, kicked his ass out. Now majority owned by its employees. So, uh, talk about the surge first, Scott, and then I'll talk a little bit more about the financials. I've been contacted by so many very wealthy people about investing in this thing, and very big names that... people I like, actually, um, who are meeting with them and talking to them. So thoughts, very... first on this surge, and then I'll get to the, um, investment soon.

You know more about this than I do. I just got on. It's the hottest new product introduction, and I know that it's not... it didn't happen in 2024, but this is the hottest new product in tech right now, no doubt. Uh, its user base has gone from 30... 13 million to 23 million in just two weeks. Its usage, its daily active usage, is now greater than Threads. This is the hottest product in tech right now. And what I would ask you, I flip it back to you, and is that... and it's one simple question, why?

Uh, well, you know, I think it's fun. It's actually fun. And, uh, look, I don't think you have to necessarily choose. I like both. I really do like Threads. Uh, I, I'd say... when Amanda was joking about it, she said, um, "Blue Sky is like the coolest bar you've ever been to, and why are you over at The Cheesecake Factory?" And I'm like, "The cheesecake is delicious." Like (laughs) , uh, you know, I think that's probably right, a good metaphor. Um, I, I li-... it's better for mar-... Threads is better for marketing my stuff, honestly, and actually has a nice vibe too, and it's a little more like Instagram with text. You know, like you... I can see... like, I don't find the really funny videos that I like. Uh, I, I find them on Threads much more. Like, I know it sounds dumb, chopping up food in creative ways or doing kind of cool karate moves or there's one I just pushed where a guy... let me look at it on Threads, um, at the top of my feed. Um, it's a guy who... mastering the art of camouflage to disappear in any setting. He's an artist who camouflages and then stands in front of things. I wouldn't have found that on Blue Sky. I would be uncool. So I'm fine with that, but I do like it. They're much funnier people. They are assembling a news-forward group of people, lot of journalists, a lot of Pauls are coming over. They're replicating that part of Twitter, the news feeling, and that's something that Threads had pushed away from, which is now... they're now moving back, letting people choose politics if they want, like politics and news. They were very much against it, and so you... days later you'd see things that happened days before. So I think Blue Sky has grabbed that, and I think that's why they're doing well, because some people like news out of these things. Some people like entertainment out of them. And so, um, I think... an- and it's a... it feels, it feels like old Twitter, but not in a toxic way. I don't think it's an echo chamber. By the way, guess who's building the echo chamber? Elon Musk is building an echo chamber over on, uh, over on his service, and to pretend otherwise is ridiculous. I mean, one of the stories that just came out is that how he's, he's, he's minimizing, um, uh, links to news, so... links to, uh, stories so that people don't get to see them. He's creating an echo chamber too, and that's what some of these things are. But I like them both. I like them both. So, uh, let me ask you about the money part though. Um, they've raised $15 million in Series A funding back in October, and then there's already interest, uh, in a new investment round. I... again, I've heard from lots of people. The CEO has said the platform is billionaire-proof because it's not one centralized feed of content. It's a protocol from which endless feeds can be created. You can also take it with you. And again, this echo chamber, I don't, uh, I think it's a nothing burger, but t- talk about h- why you would or would not invest in this.