Bluesky Social reposted this
here we gooooo! Bluesky Social referrals that were coming through with no Bluesky identification are increasingly being attributed. Signs are already very good and at this early stage my back of the napkin calculations look to be, how shall I say … not wrong 😉 Thanks Emily Liu, Jay Graber, Samuel et al! TechCrunch story here: Bluesky makes it easier for publishers to track referrals https://lnkd.in/gxaAgBUk
Traffic from Bluesky Social to The Guardian is already 2x that of Threads. But in reality I'm certain it's more like 10x that of Threads*. And Tw/X? In its first full week on #Bluesky, and with 'just' 300k followers, traffic from The Guardian's Bluesky account posts was already significantly higher than it was from The Guardian's Tw/X account posts in any week in 2024, where the main account had 10.8m followers. That 2x traffic figure is on a straight "l.threads.net" vs "bsky.app" referral comparison, but 75-85% of tracked referral (via UTMs) from Guardian Bluesky account posts is NOT being attributed to bsky.app, so I'm certain organic traffic would be undercounting by that much as well. *my original post said 2x based on that straight site referral data above. I came back and did a back-of-the-napkin calculation to work out what organic referral would be if it (very likely) followed the same percentage unattributed breakdown. The end result is that I think Bluesky referral to The Guardian is closer to 10x that of #Threads. This post brought to you by a reply to Matthew Karolian's post on Threads. That Threads post had 105 engagements at the time. Matt's same post on Bluesky had 18k+ engagements at the time I posted https://lnkd.in/g6RvdAMY (now up to 30k+ engagements) For anyone wondering about why it might be undercounting by that much, one of the Bluesky team confirmed that "we don't send referrers from the native app, so this [bsky.app] is web traffic only". I've started to see people sharing screengrabs of my Bluesky post https://lnkd.in/g43YVj3F on other platforms, so thought I'd better share same here. What I would clarify here is that is still small referral. At its peak I don't think Twitter ever contributed more than 1% of overall site traffic. For probably two years it's been less than half a percent. To overtake it is certainly not nothing, but just a reminder to keep things in perspective if anyone's getting prematurely bullish about a return to the days of huge social referral.