I hope this works for telegram! They were going to need to launch ads at some point and this transparent plan to get started seems like it considered the user base. It’s become my favorite messaging app and I enjoy the pace of innovation. I get it’s not end to end encrypted but that’s not what I am asking for with telegram - just a decent messaging app that makes it easy to remain anonymous (not sharing phone number)…
I agree. Making a decent messaging app with privacy first, they need to make money somehow. I don't want them to go out of business. Though I hope, the ads are not right in your face like youtube does.
If you're using the 17B net worth figure (the one reported by Forbes), it is mostly just based on Telegram's quoted-valuation jumping to 30-40B. A lot of his net-worth is telegram equity at this point, and he's using debt financing to keep telegram operational. The burn rate was "few hundred million dollars per year", as per Durov a year ago. Telegram has grown 50-60% in users since (350M->550M as per the graph on Wi…
You're probably right, I stand corrected. One extra point is that burn rate was likely a fraction of that figure for most of Telegram's history when it was much smaller. Telegram really only exploded to meteoric heights within the last few years. 50-60% increase in users also isn't necessarily indicative of a similar rise in expenses. The cost to store files and stream them has basically only ever gone down, and you…
Completely agree on all points (their infrastructure costs should still be in the same ballpark as before, but this growth will mark a dent).
No matter how much they optimize, Durov can't keep it running infinitely.
Popularity of a messenger hinges on it being free, and viability of ad-driven business model hinges on popularity. Meanwhile, ad-driven model is a much more comfortable and reliable source of profit (since you are popular and free, users won’t leave, so no need to work hard fighting for customers). Imagine if instead of three whales we had a variety of paid messengers, all forced to interoperate with each other and o…
I dont care how many customers the whales can support or whether they interoperate. I'll happily pay to support not just my client but who ever wants to connect to me. This is not some big yearly cost given how cheap hardware and bandwith have become.
If your service doesn’t interoperate with others, no one will connect to you unless everyone is already using the same service.
My guess is, because instant messaging only works with multiple people. The usfullness of an IM service is directly coupled to the amount of your peers using it. If there is no one to talk two, why bother? Sure, you and I may be happy to pay this, and may even fork out the fee for our loved ones, but how many other people would do that?
Whatsapp almost reached one billion monthly users before they changed from paid (1$/year) to free.
I was one of those! It was so little money for the amount of use I was getting out of it. I wish the aquisition by facebook had encouraged facebook to go with such a model. I'd happily pay e.g. €10/year to get rid of all the ads and "Suggested for you" junk and have a news feed that is just my friends and groups I joined again.
>whereas Telegram users typically take these thing seriously. And yet they don't mind the lack of encryption?
Can we stop comparing the lack of default-on e2ee in Telegram to "no encryption"? There is transport encryption in MTProto since the beginning. There are e2ee chats for those who want them.
>Can we stop comparing the lack of default-on e2ee in Telegram to "no encryption"?
I don't think we should. In the context of messaging at least, encryption should mean E2E encryption.
Bragging about client-to-server encryption is pointless nowadays, when 99% of the internet is already encrypted this way.
Matrix is an open protocol and anyone's welcome to build a front-end, inspired by Telegram, that your mother would be happy using. Perhaps you meant the Element client?
I'd wager you cannot build a Telegram-tier frontend using Matrix technology. Element is evidence of that. Clearly there's an axis with security on one side and convenience on the other. Tilting fully to either side results in a terrible experience. For me, Telegram strikes the perfect balance. Secure chats have fantastic privacy, while the UX isn't totally garbage. The trade-off is that chats are non-E2EE by default.…
> Signal's has the axis tilted all the way to the "security" end, so that the product is unusable if you aren't a technical expert already.
How so?
What's wrong with Element's UX? It's improved an awful lot lately.
> Turn off ad blocker > You appear to be using an ad blocker that may prevent pages on the Telegram Ad Platform from working as expected. > Please turn off your ad blocker or add promote.telegram.org as an exception to manage your promoted messages. > Close Oh, well ^^ I was a Telegram user for year until I completely switched to Signal 2.5 years ago. I'd pay 1-10€ a year for a Telegram experience with e2e and withou…
My guess is, because instant messaging only works with multiple people. The usfullness of an IM service is directly coupled to the amount of your peers using it. If there is no one to talk two, why bother? Sure, you and I may be happy to pay this, and may even fork out the fee for our loved ones, but how many other people would do that?
So you give a choice, either pay $5 a year, or view adverts
> Turn off ad blocker > You appear to be using an ad blocker that may prevent pages on the Telegram Ad Platform from working as expected. > Please turn off your ad blocker or add promote.telegram.org as an exception to manage your promoted messages. > Close Oh, well ^^ I was a Telegram user for year until I completely switched to Signal 2.5 years ago. I'd pay 1-10€ a year for a Telegram experience with e2e and withou…
My guess is, because instant messaging only works with multiple people. The usfullness of an IM service is directly coupled to the amount of your peers using it. If there is no one to talk two, why bother? Sure, you and I may be happy to pay this, and may even fork out the fee for our loved ones, but how many other people would do that?
Ads if you don't want to pay, no ads if you want to pay. If there is any problem with that, I fail to see it. The only thing I can really think of is that it is not economically worthwhile - the expectation is that so few people will be willing to pay or leave because of ads, that the added complexity is not worth it. You could then try to throw in some random stuff - larger file size limits, more GIFs, different skins, or whatever might work and is not too expensive - in order to motivate more people to pay, but this might again be an opportunity for a competitor who could offer your bonus stuff also to the masses that are happy with ads.
Telegram clients are open source. Whats preventing people from patching out ads out of their clients ?
To receive push notifications for iOS/Android apps, you need to upload your developer keys (!!!) to Telegram push server. So they can ban clients that disable advertising.
The open source fdroid builds don't do that, instead they receive notifications another way, without google's push service.
To receive push notifications for iOS/Android apps, you need to upload your developer keys (!!!) to Telegram push server. So they can ban clients that disable advertising.
The open source fdroid builds don't do that, instead they receive notifications another way, without google's push service.
Can you please elaborate, what 'another way'?
I know only one: keeping the app running as a service, with all associated drawbacks. The app we develop (an XMPP client) does just that.
On iOS, it is not possible at all. To make an app receive messages and notify user about them, you must use APNS, and to do that you have to upload your keys to Telegram.