Bluesky and Mastodon Sponsorship, Negotiated by Hand

Neither Bluesky nor Mastodon sells advertising. There is no auction, no ad account, no pixel and no API to buy against. Every placement is negotiated by hand with a feed operator, an instance administrator, a newsletter or a person, and priced individually. In our experience a brand can absorb somewhere between fifteen and forty thousand euros a year here before the available inventory is exhausted. If you need more than that, this is the wrong page and we will tell you so on the call. Why anyone bothers: The audiences on these networks are small, technically literate and hostile to anything that arrives looking like a media buy. They are also, for certain categories, concentrated in a way no auction reproduces: a single well-run Bluesky custom feed can hold a more precise readership than a six-figure programmatic segment. The value is precision at small volume, and it disappears the moment the placement reads as advertising. What we do: We identify the feed generators, instances, moderators and individuals whose audience matches yours, which is manual research rather than a list purchase. We approach them as their peers would, with a proposal that respects what they built. We negotiate the terms: what is said, who writes it, how it is labelled, how long it stays up, whether renewal is exclusive, and what happens if the operator changes the feed's rules mid-flight. We handle the money and the paperwork, including invoicing arrangements for individuals and non-profit instances who have never issued a commercial invoice before. Measurement without a pixel: Each placement gets its own landing path, not a query parameter, because parameter stripping is common here and privacy-conscious audiences remove them. We run a fixed post-purchase or post-signup question, add a branded search and direct-session baseline read for the fortnight before and after, and we report what that evidence can and cannot support. Nobody should present this channel with a modelled ROAS. We do not. The etiquette that decides whether this works: Disclosure is explicit and in the post itself. Cross-posting the same copy across both networks gets noticed within an hour and read as contempt. Your account handle is verified through your own domain, since an unverified brand account asking for attention is the shape of a scam. Instance rules differ and are enforced by humans who talk to each other; being blocked by one large instance can propagate through defederation and does not reverse with an apology. We refuse: Automated posting, engagement schemes, scraped follower lists and unsolicited direct messages. Pricing negotiated off follower counts, which measures nothing on a network where a three-thousand-follower account can outperform a fifty-thousand one. Placements where the operator is not allowed to say the post is sponsored. And gambling promotion, which is prohibited outright on many instances and will end your presence on the network permanently rather than temporarily; if you are an operator, we would rather place your budget on Twitch. Not included: Running your own accounts, writing your daily posts, or community moderation. Development of a custom feed generator of your own, though we will tell you when that is the better investment and what it costs to run. How it runs: One partner does the outreach personally, in French or English. Sponsorship fees are paid by you directly to the operators, so the relationship survives us. You see every negotiation, including the ones that fail, and roughly a third of approaches do fail, usually because the operator does not take sponsorship at any price.