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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

#181

Post by barbazoo »

EduardoBautista wrote: post #97
vikbytes wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the fact that Facebook owns WhatsApp and continues to erode all the "protections" users of WhatsApp initially had from the invasive tentacles of Facebook into their data on WhatsApp.

Apart from the fact that they have access to your contacts, I haven't felt that the E2E encryption of WhatsApp has been in danger of being eroded. I do use Signal when possible, but I find WhatsApp to be secure enough for my day to day messaging with friends and family. I can't say the same about Telegram since it does not have E2E encryption on by default on all messages.

For many it was the prospect of metadata being sent to WA's big brother Facebook. Personally I don't want anything to do with the FB ecosystem so I deleted my WA account. I didn't have anything against WA per se, I really like the app , just the connection to FB is unacceptable.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

WilTimSon wrote: post #48
ObsoleteNerd wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve used Telegram for years now, along with almost all my family and friends. I’m a huge fan of it, and it’s basically the only IM I use anymore (other than Signal with some tech friends). If Telegram adds ads, rather than offer us a chance to just pay them, I’ll delete it instantly and push everyone I know to do the same. I absolutely despise ads of any kind, and go to a decent amount of effort to block them from a…

You're in the minority and pretty much exercising your first-world privileges to dictate what you think the service should do. It's intended to work for everyone across the world, no matter how poor, and I'm 100% sure people from India or Brazil would leave it completely if they had to pay to use the app. Having non-targeted ads and, potentially, premium features that you can pay for is an optimal middle ground for a…

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by f1refly »

ddeck wrote: post #155
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Whatsapp is pretty much proprietary xmpp, and xmpp handles multi-end to multi-end encryption graceously.

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

#184

Post by vxNsr »

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…

Only quibble I have with Telegram is their “find nearby” feature, it’s clearly abused by bad actors to funnel users to porn, so my family sees the whole app as not family friendly, bec they don’t want their tweens and teens with phones, that are mostly locked down, having this loophole. There no way to turn it off, or lock it behind parental control, so until then we’re still stuck on WhatsApp.

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

#185

Post by swagmoney69 »

imsesaok wrote: post #151
bennofs wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Actually the Mac client supports it for some reason.

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

#186

Post by chipotle_coyote »

corobo wrote: post #134
fsflover wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Advertising and privacy don't mix. Targeted advertising and privacy don't mix. Context-based advertising is fine for the privacy. But it may not be fine if you don't like to be manipulated.

How do they track views, clicks and payouts?

You don't, ideally.

One of the great -- although I suspect inevitable -- sins of the early web was the "innovation" of tracking clicks on advertising. Ads had been around for over a century before that in other media, and the only real measure of success available to advertisers was "when I spend money on ads in this [magazine, newspaper, TV show, radio spot, billboard, …], sales appear to go up by this amount, compared to spending money on [other thing]." Selling ads based on the notion that the only effective web advertisement is the one that makes the viewer stop reading that article, right now, and drop everything to CLICK! RIGHT! THIS! MOMENT! was, in the light of all previous advertising history, absolutely bonkers.

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

#187

Post by meibo »

Angostura wrote: post #139
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…

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

Give Telegram or Matrix a try. They are both miles ahead of Signal and their teams on both sides actually seem to care about openness and usability.

Signal actively discourages third-party clients and doesn't accept community contributions in most cases(not that you'd actually want to, because their codebases are trash.) We can do better.

Matrix with bridges and your own server is quite a nice experience. Have a look at beeper: https://www.beeper.com/

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

#188

Post by Aachen »

cyrksoft wrote: post #5
tw04 wrote: post #2

Do they really need advertisers? I'm not sure why all these companies think the whatsapp route isn't possible. People are happy to pay a small yearly subscription for apps if they're truly doing something useful. While I don't personally use telegram, I'd argue it falls into the category of "useful enough to pay for".

I use Telegram a lot and would gladly pay for it. However, that route is not so easy. People in Latin American countries can't really afford to pay for apps. If they have to choose between a free WhatsApp (who everybody uses) and a fee (which can be high in real terms for poorer countries) they will choose WhatsApp. They can also do what companies like Steam and Netflix do, charge a differentiated fee by country. Som…

> less than 2 USD [per month]

How about 2USD/year? WhatsApp ran on 1 until Facebook bought it.

I did the math at the time: with the users per server and separate user stats they were publishing, each employee could be paid very, very generously. Don't quote me on it but I think it was something like half or a quarter million per year. Yes, they were small and growing, as you grow you get more overhead as you try new things like eg. business customers or whatever, so maybe it can't be 1/year anymore (also because a decade of inflation happened in the meantime), but you can get very close to that or choose to operate in low and middle income countries at break-even or a small loss. I wouldn't find that unfair (as someone who earns in the top 1% of worldwide incomes, household income like 150k/year -- yes I'm looking into how to put that boatload to good use -- and who would be paying the compensatory high price).

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

#189

Post by benhurmarcel »

schoolornot wrote: post #128
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…

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…

> The decision to resist this […] and the in-house MTProto protocol do seem kind of bizarre to me

It's so bizarre indeed that it actually looks suspicious.

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

#190

Post by pradn »

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…

Having to QR-code into a web-app is quite a pain. I wish we didn't tie identities to a phone number like that. Messenger offers even more seamless "handoff" between form-factors, and that's why I find myself preferring it. It's easy for web state to go away, so I find myself having to log back in more often than I'd like. Plus, you can't log in when the phone's out of battery. I really like how snappy Telegram's mobile clients are. I like their stickers (probably the most fun of any chat app these days) and their link preview is quite good. So I'm rooting for them.
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