Spotify’s subscription strategy is underrated
PLUS: Bluesky is anti-growth.
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Bluesky is anti-growth
Bluesky’s new CEO, Toni Schneider, sat down for a lengthy interview with The Verge, where he discussed his plans to help the platform break out of its left-of-center bubble and evolve into a more mainstream social network with broader appeal:
We’ve made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers, and it’s worked really well. There are a ton of sports conversations now on the app, and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics. It’s possible to expand.
In politics, it’s probably our hardest challenge because we have one type of user base there that’s very active. That’s good too. They are super active, and they’re very much at the forefront of politics and very engaged and very informed. But we can just keep adding more communities so that it balances out.
While I believe him that he wants to grow Bluesky into a more general purpose social media platform, I also believe that he has absolutely no idea how to do this — mostly because he and his leadership team have refused to take some very simple steps that would make Bluesky more widely appealing.
The biggest thing holding Bluesky back is its restrictive character limit. Right now, you can’t publish anything longer than 300 characters without splitting it into multiple posts, which creates a clunky reading experience.
Nearly every other major social platform allows much longer posts. Even Twitter lets subscribers exceed 300 characters for just a few dollars a month. That makes those platforms feel more like true blogging tools, where users can share complete thoughts instead of chopping them into threads.
I think Bluesky could solve this by raising its character limit while hiding anything beyond the first 300 characters behind a simple “Read more” button. It would preserve the clean look of the feed while making the platform much more pleasant to read.
Now, whenever I share this opinion, I always get pushback from people claiming they enjoy the “forced brevity” of Bluesky. But there actually is no forced brevity on the platform, since the ability to thread long strings of posts has always been built in. Indeed, most of the app’s power users utilize threaded posting prodigiously. Bluesky’s product team is fine with you posting long content, they just want the reading experience to be as terrible as possible.
Spend any amount of time on the app, and you’ll see random threaded posts shared into your feed. These require you to click through to that post and then scroll all the way up to the top of the thread just so you can determine whether the thread itself is worth reading. If this is the sort of user experience you enjoy, then I think it’s safe to say you’re a masochist. Maybe Bluesky’s power users are fine with this dynamic, but it’s less than ideal for normie internet lurkers.
Then there’s the platform’s bizarre username tagging system. Right now, if you want to mention another Bluesky user in a post, that tag not only includes their username, but also a long string of characters. Again, this makes the site less readable and less accessible to everyday internet users.
(Yes, I know the domain affixed to the end of the handle is fundamental to how Atprotocol works, but that doesn’t mean it needs to be displayed that way in the Bluesky feed. I think it would be better if a user tag defaulted to your display name and then you see the full domain if you hover over the display name or click through to the profile.)
Bluesky has also been extremely slow to monetize — only vaguely hinting at various business models it could embrace. One consistent theme I’ve returned to again and again is that social media platforms would see more long-term growth and success if they launch meaningful revenue shares with their creators, and I think this is one way that Bluesky could differentiate itself from platforms like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok. But given that the company seems completely uninterested in monetization, any nearterm rollout of a revenue share is pretty unlikely.
Of course, Bluesky’s antigrowth mindset stretches back years. After Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter in 2022, there were millions of left-of-center Elon haters who were itching to move over to another platform. Mark Zuckerberg recognized this and accelerated the launch of his own Twitter competitor, Threads.
What did Bluesky do to capitalize on this anti-Musk sentiment? It remained in closed, invite-only Beta, which meant that Threads had something like a 7-month head start in absorbing the user exodus from Twitter. I think if Bluesky had accelerated its own public launch, it’d be much larger today.
This has all been immensely frustrating for me, since I’m rooting for Bluesky to succeed. It’s one of the few quasi-mainstream social platforms that’s not owned by a tech behemoth, and I think it would be good for the open web for it to thrive. But I’ve seen little evidence that its leadership has any real interest in growing it beyond its hardcore userbase, regardless of what its CEO says.
ICYMI: How Big Cabal Media became one of the fastest-growing news outlets in Africa
CEO Tomiwa Aladekomo walked me through the company’s origin story, explained why he joined in 2018, and outlined its monetization strategy.
David Ellison’s silly antitrust arguments
David Ellison took to the New York Times op-ed page to argue that the antitrust case launched against him by 12 state attorneys general is purely political and that his critics are wrong about his own personal politics:
I believe this fight is not really about market share. If it were, it wouldn’t have been reviewed and approved by regulators reflecting 65 countries, including the United States, the European Union and China. I believe a plainer worry sits beneath the briefs and the news releases: the news. The issue is whether I can be trusted as a steward of Warner’s CNN. There has been speculation about my politics, my loyalties, my intentions.
Unfortunately, I can’t give anyone a view into my heart and mind, but I can share this: I have regularly voted for candidates of both parties; I hold some views that would be called conservative and others that would be called liberal, just like most Americans; and when it comes to our news operations, I do not aspire to lead these companies to bend their newsrooms to my views. I believe that news should be based on facts and truth.
Ellison’s claim that he’s not overtly political is plainly silly. His family consists of Trump sycophants, and there’s little reason to believe he wasn’t fully on board with Shari Redstone’s decision to pay Trump $16 million to settle a lawsuit widely viewed as clearing the way for Paramount’s merger. He installed a rightwing blogger, Bari Weiss, to gut CBS News and push it to the right, and his father Larry — who is the merger’s largest financial backer — is one of Trump’s closest friends and biggest donors. Ellison recently threw an event to honor Trump and also participated in the grotesque UFC fight on the White House lawn — after all, it was streamed live on Paramount+.
Let me put it another way: Ellison used politics to accelerate the merger and ensure its approval at the federal level, so why is it suddenly bad that oppositional political forces push back at the state level? It’s not as if he’s remained above the fray.
His argument that the antitrust case against the merger is purely political also rests on a false premise: that antitrust and politics are somehow separate issues. They’re not. One of the central justifications for antitrust enforcement in media is that excessive consolidation reduces viewpoint diversity and ultimately harms consumers. The more media outlets a single company or family controls, the greater its ability to shape public discourse and insulate its own political interests from scrutiny. It’s entirely reasonable for regulators to consider whether one of the world’s wealthiest families—one that actively lobbies the government for favorable policies—should also control two of the nation’s largest news networks.
(BTW, I used a gift link so you can access that article for free.)
There’s even more media news curation in my Substack Chat
This is a reminder that I’m extremely active in my Substack chat, which anyone can access. Not only am I curating media industry news there, but I’m also very responsive to user comments. Come chat with me and other media operators!
Behind the paywall
Here’s what I have on deck for paid subscribers:
Spotify’s subscription strategy is underrated
Programmatic advertising is becoming less relevant to brands by the minute
Let’s jump into it…