A paid telegram would be crippled from large part userbase. I would not be able to convince anyone from friends and family to use it if it were paid - they can't see the value before installing. Without them I would not pay for it as well.
I don't see that as being a hurdle. You make the first year free which, IIRC, is what whatsapp did.
It would make it a hurdle for the young userbase. When I started using Whatsapp I was ~16, and didn't have access to a credit card or any other way to pay for a yearly subscription (and I'm not sure if my parents would have okayed it).
I quite like Telegram, because I am apparently an old man at the age of 37, and I greatly prefer typing on my real physical keyboard, and not on my phone. Telegram’s desktop client for Mac is great—it’s fast, it has feature parity with mobile clients, and it works . Messages get delivered and stay in sync, and I don’t need to somehow link my phone to my main machine via QR code to act as a gateway. And if they introd…
I would pay. I like Telegram too, for some reason I find myself liking it much more than WhatsApp, it feels snappier, web and desktop Telegram fells nice, and I don't need having my SmartPhone connected. Some time ago it was unthinkable due to network effects, but now many of my peers have Telegram too, even non-tech people.
WhatsApp doesn't let me login from two mobile devices. Can't use it from phone and tablet at the same. It's moronic. Telegram does, so...
"some" people are happy to do that. Some people just don't want to pay for software regardless of anything else. I have friends who had switched to other messaging apps instead of paying WhatsApp 1€/year or whatever it was, and by any measure I live in a rich country and paying 1€/year for my friends would have been pretty much completely irrelevant economically.
This is part of the issue. Audience. Mass consumer does not know and/or does not care. If that is the case, the company can easily determine that Zoidberg approach of 'Why not both' is very rational, if annoying to people like me.
We live in a world where you can find almost any computer service for free. Not everyone is like lazy americans willing to take the credit card out at any road bump. They will find a service that does the same for free. I can barely convince my friends with that mindset to come to Telegram when they already majorly use Messenger. Not only do they need an incentive to switch to Telegram, adding a fee to use the platform would simply kill the app. There are many ways to monetize services that don't require users to pay just to join, and this is the way forward even though it's meeting resistance from companies, it will win in the long run. Don't fight it, work with it and learn to take advantage of it instead.
I would absolutely love to advertise there. Facebook, google, youtube, telegram all have cryptocurrency advertising banned... Which is rather disgusting, seeing as it's the highest appreciating asset class in the history of mankind.
Hulu once wrote about how, by offering a higher cost plan without ads, they removed a lot of the complaints about their service I've always wondered if FB offered a similar option -- $5 or $10 a month to opt out of all adds and tracking -- if a lot of the complaints about their service would also disappear.
Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.
What about ads + paid plans with no ads? I feel like that’s a great middle ground for everyone who would delete the app if it had ads. Am I missing something with that thought process?
The problem with this model from the advertisers perspective is the people with disposable income who will pay for your ad free experience are the exact people they want to show the ads to. I don’t know if telegram has this problem, but it’s certainly the problem in most ad + premium models because if I am advertising something like a car, I want the guy who can afford $10/month for her texting app to see my ad more…
This just cements my belief that advertisers no longer consider making people feel intruded upon by ads a bad thing - they directly target people who do not want to see their messaging.
The goal is to nonconsensually force their message on people who don't want it.
Strange to see people switch from end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp to non-encrypted (by default) Telegram. What do I miss?
Presumably the fact that Facebook owns WhatsApp and continues to erode all the "protections" users of WhatsApp initially had from the invasive tentacles of Facebook into their data on WhatsApp.
Apart from the fact that they have access to your contacts, I haven't felt that the E2E encryption of WhatsApp has been in danger of being eroded.
I do use Signal when possible, but I find WhatsApp to be secure enough for my day to day messaging with friends and family.
I can't say the same about Telegram since it does not have E2E encryption on by default on all messages.
Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.
That number seems wildly off. Facebook's annual revenue for 2020 was $85.97 Billion[1]. With 2.8 Billion monthly active users, they'd need to charge $3 a month to exceed that number. [1]: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
In the US it's much higher. Many users provide practically no revenue to FB (presumably FB wants the growth for the future).
What about ads + paid plans with no ads? I feel like that’s a great middle ground for everyone who would delete the app if it had ads. Am I missing something with that thought process?
The problem with this model from the advertisers perspective is the people with disposable income who will pay for your ad free experience are the exact people they want to show the ads to. I don’t know if telegram has this problem, but it’s certainly the problem in most ad + premium models because if I am advertising something like a car, I want the guy who can afford $10/month for her texting app to see my ad more…