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Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

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Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#121

Post by izacus »

tazjin wrote: post #116
perardi wrote: post #60

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…

Telegram's clients are amazing (including the ones developed by the community, such as telega.el for Emacs). It is miles ahead of any other messenger in the UX department. Friends of mine who have (reluctantly, in some cases) tried it out quickly got stuck because of this single point. The other thing it's got going for it is that its protocol is designed to work in low-bandwidth environments. Yeah, the protocol look…

Telegram actually provides a fully featured C++ library you can just include - it has a pretty good API that does most of the complex things for you.

You just register callbacks for message lists / chat messages and notifications and you're all set.

This allows people to easily build full-featured clients for pretty much any platform and it makes it easy for everyone to keep up. Very smart platform design.

I'm very disappointed that something made to be more open like Signal completely failed in this aspect and has ended being a walled garden with poor quality clients.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#122

Post by thrwaway-adtech »

_jal wrote: post #96
thrwaway-adtech wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Fuck these people.

It’s not that people who want ad-free experiences are targeted, it’s that people who have money to spare every month to buy a premium experience (in this case, not be annoyed by an ad), are highly correlated with people who you want to reach because they have money to buy your product, and that’s who they want to advertise to.

Advertisers don’t want to be spending money to reach people who will never buy their product, either because they hate their ad or because they don’t have money, but unfortunately there is no way to know who these people are in advance. Spending $10/month to not look at text ads is a sure fire way to signal you have money so you aren’t in the later camp, and people who hate ads with a passion and won’t respond to them are rare in the wild (hn nonwithstanding :D)

Too many people think they can monetize by just “sprinkle some ads on it” without thinking about why an advertiser would buy those ads.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#123

Post by rakoo »

junippor wrote: post #90
ash wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author of the parent comment specifically mentioned "change in privacy update" as the reason to switch. Until WhatsApp drops end-to-end encryption, there's not that much evil they can do. They can't read your messages. You don't need to trust WhatsApp (so far). Telegram can have the best privacy policy, but they can always read your messages. You have to trust Telegram to do the right thing. (Except those few who…

Why is this such a big issue? When I use Telegram in the past (and I did for years) every chat I had was encrypted. Enabling isn't that complicated.

It's not complicated, but it's still something you have to manually do (meaning many will never do it because they don't know it exists) and you lose a lot of features that seem to be the selling points of Telegram

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#124

Post by missedthecue »

dalbasal wrote: post #108
thrwaway-adtech wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly. FB would never do this, and google would never do it for search. It's adverse selection. Spotify is a good example. The ad supported version has uses: it's a funnel for paid users, a deterrent to competition, a data farm, etc. Making money is not one of those uses. I suspect that this is because the best advertisers audience subscribes. Also, opt out ads also harms your upside. EG, fb make more in ad revenue…

Ignoring the adverse selection problem for a moment, why don't you think FB could make more money on subs? Facebook revenue per user is $30 in the US. As long as the monthly subscription is greater than $2.50 a month, they are making more that way.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#125

Post by dalbasal »

wdb wrote: post #113
dalbasal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. FB would never do this, and google would never do it for search. It's adverse selection. Spotify is a good example. The ad supported version has uses: it's a funnel for paid users, a deterrent to competition, a data farm, etc. Making money is not one of those uses. I suspect that this is because the best advertisers audience subscribes. Also, opt out ads also harms your upside. EG, fb make more in ad revenue…

I think Spotify makes their ads purposely annoying to use it as funnel for paid plans. I have the feeling the ads got worse over time so stopped using the app. I normally don't mind listening to the news and commercial breaks on the good old radio.

Well... that's part of the premise of freemium. They could probably kill ads entirely and like without that revenue, but then why would people subscribe?

For spotify this is tolerable. Network effects exist, but they aren't everything. For telegram, network effects are the whole thing.

"Freemium" doesn't usually work the way people think it does. "Just let me pay to remove ads" is rarely good business advice. If your business model is ads, you stick with ads. If your business model is subs, you might have an ad-supported version for other reasons.

Even in old media, paid channels/papers/etc. still have ads. They don't make an ad free version.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#126

Post by newscracker »

ash wrote: post #82
junippor wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you're missing that there's more factors to a person's choice than default encryption.

The author of the parent comment specifically mentioned "change in privacy update" as the reason to switch. Until WhatsApp drops end-to-end encryption, there's not that much evil they can do. They can't read your messages. You don't need to trust WhatsApp (so far). Telegram can have the best privacy policy, but they can always read your messages. You have to trust Telegram to do the right thing. (Except those few who…

Wouldn’t you have to trust WhatsApp to do the right thing too, as far as end to end encryption is concerned? How would anyone know if the original Signal E2E is still around or changes have been made to it? WhatsApp already collects, stores and shares more metadata than Signal does. Are there any audit reports from trustworthy parties on WhatsApp behaving as expected on encryption? Or are we just relying on someone working on WhatsApp to become a whistleblower?

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#127

Post by thrwaway-adtech »

missedthecue wrote: post #124
dalbasal wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. FB would never do this, and google would never do it for search. It's adverse selection. Spotify is a good example. The ad supported version has uses: it's a funnel for paid users, a deterrent to competition, a data farm, etc. Making money is not one of those uses. I suspect that this is because the best advertisers audience subscribes. Also, opt out ads also harms your upside. EG, fb make more in ad revenue…

Ignoring the adverse selection problem for a moment, why don't you think FB could make more money on subs? Facebook revenue per user is $30 in the US. As long as the monthly subscription is greater than $2.50 a month, they are making more that way.

Because many people would not spend 2.50 a month for Facebook, and their value prop of “all your friends are here” would collapse for many users.

And then you have adverse selection putting downward pressure on the revenue per free user.

Re: Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

#128

Post by schoolornot »

perardi wrote: post #60

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 wish my buddies who are hung up on Signal's E2E, and rightfully so, would at least try Telegram to see what they are missing. An E2E-default version of Telegram would put the final nails in Signal if you ask me. The decision to resist this, and they could implement it fairly beautifully for new devices like iMessage does, and the in-house MTProto protocol do seem kind of bizarre to me. But look how far it's taken them. A beautiful product.
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