Making Money Without Breaking the Open Social Network

If ATProto is going to survive outside niche developer culture, monetization will have to happen. The open social web is fragmenting in a good way. New apps and ideas are emerging on a shared protocol, but as the pressure to monetize grows, there’s a real risk advertising pulls things back toward closed systems. Ads may still work for a handful of mega-apps, but that dynamic could easily become a barrier for new apps trying to enter the ATmosphere.

I’m not a developer, just a novice fanboy of the open social web with an idea to throw out to a community I’ve enjoyed watching grow. Go ahead and roast any technical misunderstandings in the replies.

So here’s the idea, fully up for grabs. Enable ad networks to plug in at the protocol layer, not inside any single app. Apps running on ATProto, large or small, could opt into one or more networks and receive ads served in a consistent, privacy-respecting way. Revenue flows back to the apps that display them. No one app owns the marketplace. The network becomes shared infrastructure, like payments or identity, rather than another walled garden.

If ATProto is serious about portability, monetization has to be portable too.

Participation would be gated by design, not scale. Apps apply to join networks and are approved based on advertiser safety standards, content moderation practices, and baseline trust guarantees. That gives brands a predictable environment without forcing every app to rebuild the same compliance stack. For developers, it removes a major distraction. They can focus on building communities, knowing monetization is there when they’re ready to use it.

The longer-term payoff is creator-level alignment. Because ATProto separates identity, content, and presentation, the network could pay creators directly, regardless of which app displays their work. A post earns because it’s valuable, not because it lives in the “right” client. That changes incentives across the ecosystem. Growth starts chasing substance, not the other way around.

If this doesn’t exist, new apps will struggle.

The network scales with the ecosystem without any single app needing to win a consumer brand war, creating more incentive for content the entire ATmosphere will benefit from. It aligns incentives early, before defaults harden and power consolidates. It also gives app developers a reason to grow users based on the value they add to the experience. Apps, particularly as they scale, still reserve the right to pay creators directly or build their own advertiser relationships. What this provides is a fair starting point, giving new apps and ideas a chance from day one and providing needed financial incentive to build on the protocol.

Drafted with AI support, refined by hand.