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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

#151

Post by imsesaok »

bennofs wrote: post #132
schoolornot wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Last I tried, telegram desktop on Linux didn't support e2e encrypted chats which is sad.

telegram desktop doesn't support e2e chats at all. it's a mobile only feature, and it doesn't sync between devices, even between phones.

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

#154

Post by josu »

The founder's response to the article:

Why users shouldn’t worry about ads on Telegram

I read an article that cautioned users from switching to Telegram from other apps, because "Telegram is going to introduce ads". This is misleading for at least 3 reasons:

1. There will be no ads in chats on Telegram. Users who rely on Telegram as a messaging app, not a social network, will never see ads. Private chats and group chats are and will always be ad-free. As I outlined in December, ads are being considered only in large one-to-many channels (like this one), which do not exist in any other messaging app. So users ditching older apps for Telegram won’t increase the number of ads in their lives.

2. User data will not be used to target ads. We believe that collecting private data from users to target ads the way WhatsApp-Facebook do is immoral. We like the approach of privacy-conscious services like DuckDuckGo: monetizing services without collecting information about users. So if we introduce ads in one-to-many-channels, they will be contextual – based on the topic of the channel, not targeted based on any user data.

3. We are fixing ads that are already here. In most markets, content creators on Telegram already monetize their content by selling promotional posts in their channels. This is a chaotic market with multiple third-party ad networks pushing intrusive ads that create a negative user experience. We want to fix this situation by offering a privacy-conscious alternative for channel owners.

Users will be able to opt out of ads, but I do think that privacy-conscious ads are a good way for channel owners to monetize their efforts – as an alternative to donations or subscriptions, which we are also working to offer them.

Our end goal is to establish a new class of content creators – one that is financially sustainable and free to choose the strategy that is best for their subscribers. Traditional social networks have exploited users and publishers for far too long with excessive data collection and manipulative algorithms. It’s time to change this.

https://t.me/PavelDurovs/107

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

#155

Post by ddeck »

hypertele-Xii wrote: post #92
spaniard89277 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

You may not prefer it, but I don't think it's moronic; it was a design choice.

Whatsapp messages pass through their servers, but do not remain there. They are effectively sent from the sending device to the receiving device. This means that your messages reside on your device. When you use the desktop or web client, it's basically remote operating your phone.

This famously allowed Whatsapp to achieve massive scale with relatively few resources. [1]

Telegram messages reside on their servers. This allows for features such as those discussed above - multiple synchronized clients etc. The downside (aside from potential privacy concerns) is that it requires much larger amount of infrastructure, which presumably is one of the reasons they need $700 million.

[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...

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

#157

Post by yewenjie »

bordercases wrote: post #144
tazjin wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Telega.el for Emacs is really cool with some very unique features.

https://github.com/zevlg/telega.el

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

#158

Post by mahogany »

thrwaway-adtech wrote: post #122
_jal wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 produ…

Just to be pedantic (because I was a bit confused), the emphasis shouldn't really be on "targeted" because

> and that’s who they want to advertise to

is just a fancy way of saying "targeting". What I think you're saying is that it's not people who want ad-free experiences that are being targeted. Rather, those people belong to a broader group -- those with money to spend -- who are being targeted.

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

#159

Post by loonster »

thrwaway-adtech wrote: post #127
missedthecue wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Your argument would be stronger if you used the same one that you used in your initial post.

As you previously stated, revenue is not distributed evenly. For sake of argument, the actual numbers for 5 users could be: 120, 30, 0, 0, 0 . The ad-free subscriber would not pay the average profit, they would need to pay the average profit of a paid subscriber. If we assume only the whales would pay for an ad-free experience, they would need to pay $10/month and not $2.50.

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

#160

Post by dont__panic »

Zelphyr wrote: post #130

What is the benefit of Telegram over other platforms like Signal? I haven't been on it in awhile but was quite turned off by all the "HODL!" channels that it seemed to be filled with at the time.

A lot of folks like Telegram's UX for private messages and group chats. I've been using it to talk to my friends for years and have no idea about any of the "social" channels. Personally I'd say that's probably not the best thing to to evaluate a messenger client based on -- particularly since Signal completely fails at that criteria since it literally doesn't have any social channels at all.
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