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Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon

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171–180 of 333 posts

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

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

some do and i do pay for those -- but you can't really support every single channel you watch (at least for me, youtube replaced normal tv).

so paying for youtube premium gives me an ad-free experience while also helping content creators.

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

#172
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…

“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.

Yeah, I've been on occasionally shitty mobile networks in Africa for the last months and Telegram almost always works when other things don't. Experiencing this kind of connectivity for a while really is perspective-altering.

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

#173

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. 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

Yes indeed I use it, it doesn't refute my statement.

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

#174
post #162

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. 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.

That doesn't help if I just want to use one device and yet it still doesn't support secret chat.

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

#176
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 t…

I’ll probably use whichever of them manages to allow me creating accounts and logging in without handing over my phone number.

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

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going” They have 550M MAU, using a freemium model and assuming a 1% payment conversion, that's 5.5M monthly paying users. With a price ranging $1 to $10, that can be $66M ~ $660M ARR, at least they can try.

That envelope maths might explain why they're pinning their hopes on VC FOMO cash injections to explore more speculative revenue generation models. 1% conversion to paid at $120/year sounds high for a consumer-focused app particularly popular in developing countries whose competitors are free and whose competitive advantage is supposed to be that the app doesn't know who you are. And that's apparently less than they…

100% agree

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

#179

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…

Signal user here, on iOS and using the Mac client. What am I missing?

- Seamless sync and backup

- 100x more people use it (I joined Signal years ago and I still have 1 actual conversation)

- The speed and the level of polish is unmatched

Of course for any serious Signal user it isn't an alternative but for many of us we only use it for postcard level anyway.

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

#180
post #121
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 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 d…

Exactly, Signal creator is actively against 3rd party clients, because they use his infrastructure for free:

https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...

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