3 questions the sports industry should ask before it leaps into Bluesky

What’s the biggest regularly occurring event in technology?

You might say SXSW, Meta’s F8, or Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference.

The answer, I suggest, is the US election, and it isn’t close.

Every four years, a US election fundamentally alters the tech landscape. It’s a mainstream event for consumer interest, akin to a Super Bowl or Olympics. But unlike those events, the main players in an election are lawmakers and policy shapers.

The 2016 election brought us the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The 2020 election cycle started with an advertiser boycott of Facebook and culminated in the Capitol Building attacks. That led to Donald Trump being banned from Twitter. By the following year, Elon Musk had acquired Twitter, now X.

Which leads us to the 2024 election where X and Musk played a visible role in Trump’s victory. In turn, this led to a lot of industry commentary about whether people are leaving X for alternative platforms, with Bluesky felt to be a major beneficiary.

For the sports industry, this presents a dilemma: is the buzz around Bluesky a knee-jerk response to a major event unconnected to sports, or is this the next big platform?

I spent 5 years of my career building Twitter’s business globally. I now lead a team at IMG which advises the sports industry on which digital platforms it should be using.

Based on that experience, here are 3 key questions the sports industry should require answers to, before it jumps too deeply into Bluesky.

Is it too complicated to be mainstream?

If Bluesky feels like a platform built by super-users of Twitter, for super-users of Twitter, there’s a good reason.

It was created from within Twitter to research what its platform would look like if it was decentralized. It no longer has ties to Twitter but it remains decentralized – more on that in a moment.

One criticism of the original Twitter I used to hear a lot was that it was complicated. It frustrated me at the time – I had loved the platform since my days as BBC Sport’s first social media editor; it seemed so simple to those of us who used it every day.

But you have to accept data as it is, not as you might want it to be, and Twitter never got close to the mass userbase that other platforms did.

TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube measure their users in the billions; Twitter/X got to a few hundred million and stayed there.

Twitter’s value to the sports industry has always been more than pure reach - it remains the primary ‘town square’ for real-time sports news, globally - but if the appeal of Bluesky is to be an alternative to Twitter, it’s reasonable to measure it by that benchmark.

A quarter of a billion regular users is the minimum benchmark for that comparison and for that to happen, you need to remove friction for mainstream users.

If people found Twitter unintuitive, it’s hard to imagine Bluesky will have more success, because it has the same look and feel as Twitter, having been created as a version of it. Plus, the biggest change from original Twitter - being decentralized - could make it even more off-putting for mainstream users at scale.

In reality, the decentralized element won’t make a jot of difference to most people who use the platform. But to get beyond tech-savvy early adopters, you need people to be curious about what Bluesky is, and for them to have no friction in their sign-up journey. Words like ‘decentralized’ and ‘federated’ are unlikely to feel welcoming to those broader demographics.

If we agree that old Twitter had (still has) a much smaller userbase than the biggest platforms, we can also agree that even if 100% of X’s userbase upped and left for Bluesky, it would still be niche, in relative terms. And Bluesky won’t get 100% of that userbase, because X is still alive and kicking, and even if a few people leave X, there’s a plethora of platforms they will go to, not just one. Reddit, Threads and others will already have inherited some of that traffic.

One of Bluesky’s innovations is a ‘marketplace of algorithms’ where users can shop around for content they want to see. Sounds great in theory. In practice, the rest of the tech industry is heading in the opposite direction. TikTok, Netflix and others are serving content they know we will like, based on our consumption habits. Beyond the relatively small number of super-users, people are better at showing us what they want rather than telling us. Especially when they are first signing up and don’t yet trust a platform.

Lastly, sports organisations will want to know about the verification process. First impressions – it’s manageable but has complexities we haven’t seen before.

You verify your account through your website. Specifically, your website's DNS (Domain Name System). It won’t be daunting for a good Head of Digital but even they will need to wander down the corridor to have a conversation with IT.

Employees can then have a username that’s a version of this. Here’s where the sports industry will run into an issue. The players at a football club aren’t normal employees – they won’t want their accounts linked to the club. Many players won’t have their own website.

And even on-air media people - a prominent demographic on X, and one that Bluesky will hope to attract - regularly move between companies and therefore need to change usernames.

Some of us remember that it was a big story when Laura Kuenssberg moved from BBC to ITV (and later back again) and had to change her Twitter handle. That was in 2011. On Bluesky, 13 years later, that process would be more complicated, when you'd hope that technlogy would be simpler.

What happens when something goes wrong?

Either Bluesky scales to mass-market (which, as above, means a quarter of a billion regular, logged-in users, as a minimum) or it doesn’t.

If it doesn’t scale to that level, it hasn’t necessarily been a waste of time for the sports industry. Valuable communities can be grown on smaller platforms. It just means that it isn’t, in fact, the new Twitter, which seems to be the basis on which sports is interested.

If it does scale to mass consumer take-up, there will be problems around abuse, bullying, hate speech, and more.

Those are the only two outcomes – it doesn’t climb those peaks, or it does, but with bad elements along for the ride.

It has never been the case that a social media platform has hit mass-market levels of audiences and not had those issues. Humans, at scale, include what tech platforms call ‘bad actors.’

We should also acknowledge as a sports industry that we bring these elements to platforms – it isn’t as simple as the platforms bringing toxicity to sports, despite what many people in sports have conveniently chosen to believe over the years.

Bluesky has a moderation team but it’s already been inundated by the recent influx and that will only get harder if Bluesky keeps growing at its current rate.

We may also see, possibly for the first time, what happens when some of the worst elements of social media behaviour take place on a decentralized platform. Would things play out differently if an athlete runs into toxic hate speech which was published to a platform by a user on a self-hosted server? I’m not sure if we know that answer yet.

How will it make money?

Running a platform at mass scale is expensive. Bluesky won’t be able to live on investment capital forever. The sports industry might shrug and say it isn't our problem, but the monetization models that platforms choose inevitably alters the user experience.

Sooner or later Bluesky might need to sell advertising, sell user data, or sell layers of premium membership for enhanced features. For now, it seems the third of these is more likely.

Paid premium tiers sounds a lot like one of the product changes on X that lots of people said they didn’t like.

There’s no right or wrong here but sports organisations may want to consider the long-term prospects of any platform they are pushing their audiences towards. How platforms develop over time is, like it or not, linked to how they pay their bills.

We might also question if the introduction of paid tiers - on either X or Bluesky - is the best way to reach mass audiences at scale. As above, if we can’t reach mass audiences at scale on Bluesky, is it, in fact, the alternative to X that many people say it is, and is it the right platform to be dedicating precious resources to?

In summary

I’m not negative about Bluesky – just realistic. I know from experience how hard it is to scale a platform like this.

I fell in love with Twitter before I worked there. I passionately promoted it for 5 years of my life when it was my job to do so. I kept loving it, and using it, after I left the company. I would be thrilled if a platform, which is essentially a version of Twitter from its pre-X era, was to succeed.

There’s limited future in just being a Twitter nostalgia platform, though. We all saw from Mike Tyson’s recent fight that things often aren’t quite as good the second time around.

To be fair to Bluesky, with the decentralized aspect and other features, it is doing new things.

Important to acknowledge, also, that X remains a viable platform for sports. The world’s most iconic sports organisations, and the biggest-hitting sports media figures, still post there. Sports news still breaks there. Giving up an audience which is hard-won over many years is not a step to take lightly.

I also love the sports industry, and I’m acutely aware that media teams at sports organisations do not have unlimited resources, so they have to ruthlessly prioritise.

It’s easy to set up a profile on a new platform, but what’s your long-term strategy for sustaining that channel? How do you prioritise between platforms? How are you measuring Bluesky against, say, Reddit, WhatsApp Channels, Discord or Threads, let alone heavyweights like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook? Use of any social media platform is a means to an end, and its objectives will vary between organisations.

In the IMG digital team, we’re very proud of the work we’ve done with our clients on all the platforms above. We even rank them each year. There’s a host of options out there for those innovative enough to take advantage - a platform like Reddit is, for example, one that we've had fun experimenting with on behalf of our clients.

If Bluesky can prove it has a place in that roster, nobody would be happier than me. But to be sustainable, it does need to prove it, by showing us what it is, and what it can be. We should give it the chance to do so, and not rush to define it by what it isn't (X).

Let’s see what it can become. As someone who has been part of a journey like the one it's now on, I wish it all the luck in the world.