Referral Traffic Shows Why the Press Loves Bluesky

Bluesky favored over Threads as the news media’s alternative to X

Social networks have been proving a less reliable traffic source for news publications in recent years, but Bluesky may prove to be the exception that is winning the love of the news media. Bluesky’s web traffic and app engagement ballooned immediately after the election in the US, making it a suddenly much more significant player – albeit still much smaller than X by every measure.

Just last week, the New York Times added Bluesky to the social sharing widget that appears at the top of its articles, placing the Bluesky butterfly just after Facebook and above X. Meta’s Threads, the other microblogging rival to X, doesn’t appear on the list of social sharing targets at all.

Why give so much attention to a small but growing upstart? Maybe because Bluesky punches above its weight in the volume of traffic it is sending to news sites. For example, x.com commands roughly 33 times more total web traffic than bsky.app, but sent less than double the traffic to nytimes.com in November, according to Similarweb estimates. Threads, which is much smaller than X, but bigger than Bluesky by most measures, is an even weaker news traffic driver.

In different ways, both X and Threads are designed to capture traffic for themselves rather than encourage users to click through to the source of an article, while Bluesky is emphasizing that it wants to work with publishers.

Key takeaways

• Despite leading in worldwide traffic, the Threads website (threads.net) did not drive as many referrals to news sites in November. Bluesky (bsky.app) drove 5 times more referrals to nytimes.com, 2.6 times more traffic to theguardian.com, and 6.8 times more traffic to bostonglobe.com than Threads did to each of these sites.
• These comparisons in favor of Bluesky may be inflated by the fact that Bluesky itself was making news in November. For example, Bluesky drove roughly 1.5 million referral visits to nytimes.com, and articles about Bluesky accounted for more than 450,000 total visits to nytimes.com (not necessarily referrals). Even if we fudge the numbers, assuming 1 million referral visits driven by other topics, that would be three times more news referral traffic than Threads generated.
• Threads generated 24.5 million outgoing referrals in November, but 42% of that traffic was to sister site instagram.com. Bluesky generated 38.6 million outgoing visits, spread more evenly across a variety of news websites.
• Sticking with the example of nytimes.com, X drives more traffic referrals than other established social networks including Facebook and Reddit. But based on desktop web traffic, X drives only about 1.7 times as much traffic as Bluesky, despite being much larger.

The post-election surge of interest seemed to reflect pent-up demand for an alternative to X from people who didn’t consider Threads a good option. Since then, Meta has introduced a number of changes that look like competitive responses to Bluesky (for example, with its own equivalent to Bluesky Starter Packs of recommended accounts).

Bluesky celebrates its engagement advantage

Bluesky celebrated the love it has been getting from the news media with a late November blog post, The Engagement Is Better on Bluesky, saying “we welcome publishers, we don’t demote links,” and featuring quotes from digital leaders at The Boston Globe, The Guardian, and The New York Times, each of whom reported seeing surprising large volumes of referrals from Bluesky, even at this early stage of its development.

Here is what the comparison with Threads looks like, according to Similarweb estimates. 

For the Boston Globe, which is not included in the chart, Bluesky generated 53.4K referral visits, compared with 7.9K from Threads.

Tremendous Growth, Particularly in the US

If we measure Bluesky by its month-over-month growth in the US in November, it looks like a juggernaut. By web traffic, Bluesky’s growth (+189%) might even be coming at the expense of X (-3.6%). On a worldwide basis, traffic to Bluesky was up 75%, while traffic to X was down 2.3%. That traffic to X would be down is surprising, given that its highest traffic days of the year came around the time of the election. 

By monthly active users of its iOS and Android apps, Bluesky is up 295.4%, compared with a 2.4% gain for X.

However, Bluesky’s gains are on a much smaller base – reflecting the app’s emergence from obscurity. In the US, bsky.app is ahead of threads.net in web traffic – but still far behind x.com.

In worldwide traffic, and by app users, Bluesky trails Threads. Still, Bluesky has been closing the gap, as you can see from this chart of daily app usage in the US.

Where will Bluesky go once the novelty wears off?

For a few weeks in November, Bluesky looked like it was on a straight ride up to the top of the web traffic rankings. But since mid-November, web traffic and app engagement have both seemed to plateau, suggesting that the next increment of growth may come harder.

On the other hand, if the love story between Bluesky and the media continues, that could fuel further growth in 2025.

The Similarweb Press Office can pull additional or updated data on request for the news media (write to press@similarweb.com). When citing our data, please reference Similarweb as the source and link back to the most relevant blog post or similarweb.com/blog/insights/.

Methodology

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by David F. Carr

David covers social media, digital advertising, and generative AI. With a background in web trends since the 1990s, he’s also the author of "Social Collaboration for Dummies".