Bluesky and Mastodon Sponsorship Placements, Negotiated Directly

Start here, because it changes the brief: Neither network sells advertising. There is no auction, no pixel, no lookalike audience, and on most Mastodon instances the server rules forbid advertising outright. Buy there anyway and your domain gets blocked at instance level, which is public, spreads across the federation through shared blocklists, and is effectively permanent. What is actually purchasable is sponsorship: custom feeds on Bluesky, newsletters and podcasts whose readership lives on these networks, instance hosting costs carried openly with a disclosure line, and a small number of community-run aggregators that accept sponsors and say so. What you can and cannot know: You will not get a cost per acquisition here, and anyone promising one is guessing with a straight face. We measure with a unique landing path per placement, one code per host, a post-purchase or post-application question asking where the person heard of you, and branded search movement in Search Console across matched pre and post windows. On the programmes we have run, that captures somewhere between forty and sixty percent of the response. We report the captured part as captured and the remainder as unknown, in those words. What we refuse: No undisclosed paid posts. No paid follows, no reply farming, no coordinated accounts. No audience building from the ATProto firehose; the data is open and reading it for ad targeting is still a line we will not cross, and the people you want to reach are exactly the ones who would notice and post about it. No quiet approach to a moderator to work around an instance's stated rules. If a host wants the sponsorship hidden, we withdraw from the placement. Where it works: Technical hiring is the strongest case we have seen. Engineers and infrastructure people left the larger networks early and are reachable here through hosts they already trust, which is why a single well-placed feed sponsorship can outperform a quarter of paid social for a senior backend role. Developer tooling and independent publishing follow. Consumer retail generally does not, and we will say that on the first call rather than after the invoice. Deliverables: A placement map naming real hosts with real rates, audience evidence, and whatever traffic history we can obtain from them. Negotiation and booking, with host fees paid by you directly to the host. We do not mark up media and we do not hold your budget. Copy written for the format, because a text post that reads like a banner is dead on arrival in these communities and takes the host's credibility with it. A disclosure standard your legal team signs once and every host follows. Not included: No community management, no posting from your accounts, no Discord or Slack presence, no press outreach. We do not buy Reddit or X placements inside this engagement. Different markets, different rules, and blending them makes it impossible to tell which one worked, which is the only question worth answering here. Who should not buy this: Anyone whose channels must report a cost per acquisition weekly. Anyone who needs to place more than about thirty thousand euro a quarter here; the honest supply of good placements is smaller than that number, and padding a plan to absorb a budget is the standard failure of this whole category. And anyone who wants the reach numbers to look like paid social. They will not. The argument for this work is who reads it, not how many. How it runs: Three weeks of host research and vetting, then booking, then a flight with a fixed measurement window either side of it so the branded search read has something to compare against.