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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

#161

Post by vhiremath4 »

thrwaway-adtech wrote: post #74
vhiremath4 wrote: post #52

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…

Ah this makes total sense. Thanks for the additional info!

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

#162

Post by f311a »

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.

That's because there is no support for multiple devices when you use secret chats.

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

#163

Post by fakedang »

fernandotakai wrote: post #44
davidweatherall wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you happy with services that have ads, but give the option to remove them for a subscription fee?

i have zero problems with this kind of monetization. i mean, that's why i pay for youtube and spotify -- i wanna support the services/content creators in some way, but i abhor ads.

Don't most you tubers and Spotify channels have patreons?

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

#164

Post by risyachka »

newscracker wrote: post #137

Pavel Durov, the CEO of Telegram, has repeatedly said the following on his Telegram channel about ads on Telegram: - ads will be only on very large public channels and not on all public channels - there won’t be any ads in chats - the ads will be contextual, and not based on tracking or profiling users and their activity - users will be able to opt out of ads Other monetization options like donations and subscription…

Same. UI/UX-wise and super light and blazing fast native clients - I would gladly pay like ~$5/month.

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

#165

Post by perardi »

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…

“designed to work in low-bandwidth environments”

And I have actually experienced this, fairly frequently.

T-Mobile international roaming, at least on my provided corporate plan, is throttled to 128kbps. And Telegram works. Messages come through quickly, and it seems fairly smart about deferring media loading.

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

#166

Post by dalbasal »

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.

So, two points.

First, I think facebook's global revenue per user is $30. US should be much higher. My back-of the envelope has it @ $225 per year currently ($43bn revenue from 190m users)... I may be wrong. Don't hurt me.

Second, they make $225 (or $30) per user while also maintaining a very high number of users. You can't expect to put up a paywall and not lose users. So, to reach parity, you need to charge enough for subs to replace those.

For FB, it's flat impossible. That's why I picked it as an example. You cannot have 190 million americans as paying users at any price. You definitely can't have that many @ $20 per month.

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

#167

Post by skinkestek »

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…

There won't be ads in 1-1 or groups.

There will be ads in channels that opt in (but those already have sponsored posts in some form already often, only manually inserted.)

So, some will say: how long before they change their terms again and the ui is plastered with ads?

We'll see. So far Durov has kept his words to a degree that few others have.

Edit: I also think Telegram has dropped the cryptocurrency-idea now.

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

#169

Post by jamesrr39 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #40
ComodoHacker wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pavel clearly has a social agenda behind Telegram. He wants to provide access to independent uncensored communication platform to everyone for free. So looks like ads is the only other option left for now.

Today ads never come without tracking. This is the problem. And even without tracking ads are a kind of garbage I don't want anyway. So, the day I get ads in Telegram I'm leaving. At the same time I wouldn't mind a reasonable (~1$/month, I don't do anything heavy, text messaging only) subscription.

I'm not sure about this, if anything there seems to have been a few services recently (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Qwant) that are supported by ads (presumably with metrics on ad performance for advertisers) but without following you around the internet. They seem to be doing ok as businesses, and it seems a reasonable compromise to me.

I'm curious about how Telegram will decide what ads to show, how heavily it will try and personalize them; will the ads be relevant to the channel you are in or follow you around Telegram.

FWIW, personally, I like the idea of a choice of ads or paid subscription best.

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

#170

Post by dillondoyle »

josu wrote: post #154

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 ch…

Would that be enough revenue? The article doesn't list yearly costs but implies it's a lot with $1bb in debt needed (also do they advertise at scale to fund growth? that would be big source of $ that would be worth the cost).

Maybe if they really do grow 1:many channels to actually be competitive to FB products they could charge businesses for API access to provide customer support & empower company:1 user messaging.

Kind of more like Twitter which doesn't have a ton of user data to target ads as well - though Twitter does allow audience matching, if Telegram allowed matching to user phones that would be valuable.

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