Graze Goes to Market

One month ago, Andrew and Devin had a quick phone chat after meeting on Bluesky - Andrew was creating beautiful interfaces for building feeds, and Devin was doing crazy things with real time data processing. They decided to join forces to hack on a cutting edge feed building project … and Graze Social was born.

In those four weeks, we've grown from a rough sketch of an idea to rendering nearly a billion posts to users across the Bluesky network. We’re experiencing explosive growth, and are spending every spare hour working on an ambitious vision: making it possible for anyone to use content discovery and filtering tools that, until now, have only been in the hands of the biggest social media companies.

What started as a small gamble has escalated quickly, and our money and time commitments are growing beyond what we can afford on our own. So, now we’re planning for the long term, and investing a lot of thought (and code) into figuring out how to build a sustainable business to support the technology and people behind the scenes.

Here's the good news: we believe that we can continue hosting your custom feeds for free.

We want as many people as possible to stretch our tools, explore what can be done, and build awesome feeds. This helps us build a better product, you to explore how to build better feeds, and ultimately, deliver a better experience for everyone on Bluesky.

Instead of a traditional model, we want to try something different: we’ll make money when you make money.

Here’s the plan: we’re giving you the tools to pick and publish sponsored posts in your feeds, at rates that you determine. You have complete editorial control over who your sponsors are! This means anyone with an audience on Bluesky can build a community or business on top of the Graze platform.

We’ve been running this quietly with early testers, and in the coming days, we will be rolling out these tools and services for everyone. You'll be able to flag your feed as monetizable on Graze, and other users on Graze will be able to send you proposals for sponsored campaigns. You’ll also be able to monetize your own feed by the same mechanism. We’ll facilitate the payments to ensure you get paid by your sponsors, and we’ll take a small service fee to keep our systems and people online - but the majority of the sponsorship money for your feed goes into your pocket. We believe that this will help upend the traditional relationship between users of social media and the platforms that place them at their mercy. We want to empower a new class of users to help us define what the next generation of social media will look like.

We're excited about this path forward - we think it works out well for everyone involved, and we hope that you’ll try it out when it launches!