Bluesky for Business: Is It Worth It for UK Brands in 2026?

Every few months someone in a UK marketing meeting asks the same question: should we be on Bluesky? It is a fair question. Bluesky passed 47 million registered accounts this month, it has no adverts, and it has become a hub for journalists, researchers and industry experts.

It is also a platform where the headline numbers and the day-to-day reality are very different. This guide sets out what Bluesky for business looks like in the UK in 2026: how many people really use it, whether you can advertise, who it suits, and how to test it without wasting your team's time.

Our founder Ben Metcalfe was quoted in Hootsuite's October 2026 guide to Bluesky strategy, and his advice there sums up the approach we take at BlackFire Marketing: treat Bluesky as a place to build a community, not a place to buy customers.

What is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a short-form social network that looks and feels a lot like early Twitter. People post short updates, reply, repost and follow accounts. The big difference sits underneath. Bluesky runs on an open system called the AT Protocol, so other apps can plug into the same network, and users choose which feeds they see.

That matters for brands in three ways:

• There is no single algorithm to crack. Users can switch between a chronological Following feed, a Discover feed and thousands of custom feeds built by other users around topics such as books, science or a specific industry.
• You cannot pay for reach inside the app. Bluesky does not sell adverts.
• Posts are public by design. Bluesky describes all content on the network as publicly accessible and indexable, which makes it a different kind of channel from closed groups or private messaging.

How big is Bluesky in 2026?

This is where most "Bluesky for business" articles get muddled, because they mix up two very different numbers.

Registered accounts

Bluesky's own 2025 transparency report, published on 29 January 2026, says the network grew nearly 60% in 2025, from 25.94 million to 41.41 million users. Users created 1.41 billion posts during the year.

The count has kept climbing. A public tracker that reads the total straight from the network showed 47,125,031 registered accounts on 22 October 2026.

Active users

Registered accounts never go down, because they count everyone who ever signed up. Active use tells a different story. According to Similarweb data reported by TechCrunch in August 2026:

• Bluesky's mobile app had 10.4 million monthly active users worldwide in June 2026, down 27.2% year on year.
• Mobile daily active users fell 25.6% year on year to around 3 million in July 2026.
• The quarterly average fell from around 22.1 million monthly active users in the last quarter of 2024 to 10.7 million in the second quarter of 2026.

The same data had a more positive point for marketers. The people who stayed are engaged: Bluesky's ratio of daily to monthly users was roughly 29% in June, about the same as Threads.

How it compares with X and Threads

For scale, Similarweb put X at around 302 million monthly active mobile users in June 2026 and 123.7 million daily mobile users in July. Threads reached 147 million daily active users in July 2026, up 21.3% year on year.

So Bluesky is a small, committed network, not a mass-market one. That is the single most important fact to keep in mind when deciding how much time to give it.

Is Bluesky popular in the UK?

The UK is one of Bluesky's biggest markets. Similarweb traffic data cited by Hootsuite puts the UK at 9% of Bluesky's web traffic, second only to the United States at 49%, and ahead of Japan, Germany and Canada.

There is also a UK-specific detail worth knowing. Because of the Online Safety Act, Bluesky introduced age assurance for UK users in July 2025. Its transparency report lists 274,163 UK accounts that had been age assured by the end of 2025. Unverified UK users get a restricted experience, so if your audience includes younger people, expect some of them to see less than adults do.

Can you advertise on Bluesky?

Not in the way you can on Meta, TikTok or LinkedIn.

No native ads

Bluesky has no advertising platform. There is no ads manager, no audience targeting and no boosted posts. This is the core of Ben's advice in the Hootsuite Bluesky strategy guide:

"I would encourage brands to think of Bluesky as a community-building channel rather than a paid acquisition channel."

He went on: "With no ad budgets to lean on, your growth will come from being useful in conversations, building or joining custom feeds, and, most importantly, giving people a reason to follow you."

Sponsored posts in custom feeds

There is one paid route, but it sits outside the Bluesky app itself. Graze, a third-party tool for building custom feeds, lets advertisers pay to place existing Bluesky posts inside feeds whose owners have switched on monetisation. Advertisers pick feeds by topic and set a cost per thousand impressions, the feed owner approves or rejects each campaign, the minimum spend is $25, and Graze keeps 30%.

Every sponsored post must carry a hashtag such as #ad or #sponsored. For UK brands, that sits neatly alongside the ASA's existing rules on labelling ads, which we cover in our guide to gifted collaborations. Treat Graze as a small test budget for niche communities, not a replacement for your main paid channels.

Payments, not ads

Bluesky's leadership has been clear about its direction. Speaking at TechCrunch Disrupt on 15 October 2026, CEO Toni Schneider and COO Rose Wang said Bluesky plans to introduce payments in the coming months, as the first step in a strategy to make money without relying on advertising.

What is new on Bluesky in 2026?

The product has filled in a lot of gaps this year:

• Drafts arrived in February 2026, which makes planning posts far easier.
• Group chats for up to 50 people launched on 11 June 2026, Bluesky's first feature built for communities.
• Live Now lets streamers add a "LIVE" badge to their profile that links to their stream.
• Attie, Bluesky's AI tool, helps users build their own custom feeds.

Bluesky's 2026 roadmap also promised a dedicated team for the Discover feed and work on topic tags, both of which should make it easier for brands to reach people who do not follow them yet.

Who Bluesky works for, and who should skip it

A good fit

• B2B firms, consultancies and specialist services whose buyers, peers or trade press are active there.
• Brands that want coverage from journalists, researchers or commentators.
• Charities, universities, public sector bodies and campaign groups.
• Founders and experts who are happy to post under their own name.

Probably not yet

• Businesses that need direct-response sales from paid social.
• Local trades and consumer brands whose customers are mainly on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok.
• Teams that can only post once a fortnight. Bluesky's Following feed is chronological, so infrequent posts disappear fast.

As Ben put it to Hootsuite: "Your reach comes down to when you post, how often, and whether users have chosen to follow you."

If your audience is not there, put the time into channels where it is. Our guide to organic vs paid social helps you decide where the effort pays back.

How to set up Bluesky for business

There is no separate business account on Bluesky. You set up a normal account and make it look and act like your brand.

1. Use your website domain as your handle. Instead of yourbrand.bsky.social, you can be @yourbrand.co.uk by adding a DNS record. Bluesky says more than 309,000 accounts use domain handles, and it is the simplest way to prove you are the real business and make impersonation harder.
2. Know how the blue tick works. Bluesky's blue checks are not for sale. By the end of 2025 it had verified 4,327 accounts, either directly or through Trusted Verifiers such as news organisations. Most small businesses will rely on their domain handle.
3. Fill in the basics. Logo, a clear bio that says what you do and where, and a link to your site.
4. Find your feeds. Search the Feeds tab for your sector and save the active ones. Some feeds pick up posts with certain keywords or hashtags, so learn what each one includes.
5. Put people first. Posts from a founder, head of product or specialist usually travel further than a logo account.
6. Plan a few content pillars. Useful explainers, quick takes on news in your industry, original data and replies to other people. Keep promotion light. Our post on why your brand does not need more content explains why fewer, better posts win.
7. Post consistently. Pick a schedule you can actually keep, then test different times.

How to measure whether Bluesky is working

Native analytics on Bluesky are limited, so decide up front what success looks like:

• Replies and quote posts from the people you want to reach, not just likes.
• Referral traffic to your website, tracked with UTM tags in GA4.
• Enquiries and coverage, such as a journalist request, a podcast invite or a sales conversation that started on Bluesky.
• Search visibility. Public posts and profiles can help people find you when they search your brand name. Our guides to social search and AI search visibility explain how social activity feeds into discovery.

Give it a fixed test, such as three months, then judge it on leads and opportunities, not follower counts. Our guide on how to measure marketing ROI shows how to set that up.

Bluesky vs X vs Threads for UK brands

• X still has far more users and a working ads platform, so it remains the bigger reach play, though you will need your own brand-safety checks and should expect falling organic reach there as elsewhere.
• Threads has the scale and links to Instagram, which makes it the stronger choice for consumer brands that already have an Instagram audience.
• Bluesky is smaller but engaged, with no ads and a strong presence of journalists and experts. It suits thought leadership and PR more than direct sales.

For many UK B2B firms, the sensible order is still LinkedIn first. Our guide to LinkedIn carousels in 2026 covers one of the formats that works there. Bluesky then becomes a low-cost extra channel for your experts.

FAQ

Is Bluesky worth it for business in the UK?

It is worth a low-cost test if your customers, industry peers or trade press are active there, which is common in B2B, media, charities and the public sector. The UK is Bluesky's second-largest market by web traffic, but the platform is far smaller than X or Threads and has no ads, so it suits community building rather than direct sales.

Does Bluesky have ads?

No. Bluesky has no native advertising platform. Third-party tool Graze lets advertisers sponsor posts inside custom feeds whose owners opt in, with a $25 minimum spend and clear #ad labelling.

How many people use Bluesky?

Bluesky had 41.41 million registered users at the end of 2025, and more than 47 million registered accounts by October 2026. Active use is much lower: Similarweb estimated 10.4 million monthly active users of the mobile app in June 2026.

How do I verify my business on Bluesky?

Set your website domain as your handle by adding a DNS record in your domain settings. This proves you own the account. Blue ticks are given by Bluesky or its Trusted Verifiers and cannot be bought.

Next step

If you want to know whether Bluesky is worth your team's time, or how to fit it alongside LinkedIn, Instagram and your paid media, our social media management team can audit where your audience really spends its time and build a plan around it. You can also read more about Ben. Book a call or email hello@blackfiremarketing.co.uk with your website and the channels you use now.