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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

#141

Post by Aloha »

pgt wrote: post #39

Please just let me pay for Telegram. And let me implement my own payment provider for bots because the Telegram ones suck.

I'm an early adopter for telegram, and I'm right there with you.

I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I've built out a pretty decent social network on there, and run a dozen or so specialty community chats. I'd be glad to pay them something, 25 a year or so, even if I don't get anything special from it (though, if I did want something, it'd be better access to support if I should need it), just as part of making the service sustainable.

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

#142

Post by lotsofpulp »

_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.

> The goal is to nonconsensually force their message on people who don't want it.

What part of the post you replied to indicates nonconsensual?

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

#144

Post by bordercases »

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'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.

Many of Telegram's official clients do not support Secret Chat, an issue which has been open for at least five years now. Their community picks up the slack.

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

#145

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

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…

You have to trust WhatsApp, because it is closed-source. Nothing stops them from planting a backdoor and enabling it specifically on your device, or from updating the E2E protocol to make it insecure.

If your threat model includes WhatsApp/Telegram developers, you can't use WhatsApp but you can actually (carefully) use Telegram's E2E chats, because Telegram's client is an open-source app with reproducible builds. E2E in a closed-source app is useless, and all UX inconveniences of E2E are just "security theater".

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

#146

Post by grishka »

redisman wrote: post #138
grishka wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There will be no ads in the sense you're suggesting.

Ad providers want to target their ads or you'll get the worst performing ads which won't generate much revenue for anyone.

They may want it, but it's Pavel Durov who makes the ultimate decision, and, knowing him as well as I do, I'd say that it's very unlikely he'll allow any semblance of tracking or targeting. He has no sympathy for surveillance capitalism and "growth".

Besides, as I said in another comment, ads will only exist in channels. Channels have already sold ads directly since about forever.

Also: https://t.me/durov/153

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

#147

Post by smachiz »

indymike wrote: post #129

I'd be more than happy to pay for Telegram service for my family and I. I'm tired of depending on ad supported software where my input as a user is out of alignment with the paying customer. Better to be both user and customer.

Doesn't mean you don't end up the product anyway.

Which is the real rub. Paying for a product is no guarantee that your data won't be misused anyway. It's incremental money for the taking for any enterprise.

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

#149

Post by Aloha »

I'm an early adopter for telegram, and I'd be glad to give them some money.

I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I've built out a pretty decent social network on there, and run a dozen or so specialty community chats. I'd be glad to pay them something, 25 a year or so, even if I don't get anything special from it (though, if I did want something, it'd be better access to support if I should need it), just as part of making the service sustainable.

It'd made coordination in my life so much easier, and I legitimately cannot fathom going thru the pandemic without it, it's been my social lifeline.

Mostly I love it because its a desktop has parity environment, I literally sit in front of a computer 12+ hours a day, why do I want to limit myself to a phone-only service.

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

#150

Post by dalbasal »

_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.

Online advertisers are much simpler than that.

They want sales, or signups or whatever acronym they need to force up. Group A converts at 10%. Group B at 1%. The advertiser may have a theory of why these groups are different. Increasingly, we don't. FB, especially, does a lot of automated targeting.

Marketers tend to have good instincts about these things, because patterns are repetitive and simple. That said, I'm pretty confident that advertising to subscribers would be more effective than advertising to non subscribers.

In my mind, "person who subscribed to a thing online" is just a good qualifier. It probably correlates to a lot of other qualities like "shops online often" or whatnot. Those "theories" don't really matter though. They're just a starting point.

Advertisers don't know or care what people think of the ads nor how they make the 98.3% who didn't buy anything feel. All they know is that they didn't click/buy/whatever.

I think people imagine online advertisers like a geekier version of mad men. It isn't like that. There's not the pretensions of understanding or influencing psychology. It's more like stock trading.

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