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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

#191

Post by fsflover »

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…

> it has feature parity with mobile clients

There are no secret chats though.

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

#193

Post by vinay427 »

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…

I'm honestly not sure what I'm missing when avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations. There's no desktop client support (unlike Signal which works on a desktop mostly seamlessly, including group video) and no option at all to backup and sync conversations between devices (unlike Signal's rather limited options).

If I was alright with Telegram's non-E2EE conversations, I would prefer WhatsApp for its wider adoption among my contact base.

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

#194

Post by theleftfielder »

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…

It's funny to see this towards the top of the comments here. Feels like not that long ago that Telegram updates would be downvotes on HackerNews because "you should never trust an app that designed their own encryption protocol."

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

#195

Post by timlatim »

fullstop wrote: post #21
dgellow wrote: post #8

Let people pay for premium stickers. Split between Telegram and the artists. Win-win-win. Line does this well (at least it did in the past, I’m not in Asia anymore)

Given Telegram's user base I can see these premium stickers being copied and made public very quickly. I'm not sure how you prevent this.

I think algorithmically detecting paid stickers on upload can work. I needed to detect duplicate images for a pet project once and I've got satisfying results out of using perceptual image hashing. Building up a database of hashes for existing files takes time, but after that looking up an image to see if it's in the database is fast, and it handles some basic color transforms, as well as minor cropping.

I'm not sure whether this particular approach is feasible at the scale of Telegram. But I believe this arrangement can be a good income source without upsetting users the way ads might.

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

#196

Post by Aachen »

tubularhells wrote: post #46
sfifs wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. WhatsApp can only potentially read your group messages since 1:1 messages are end to end encrypted. You shouldn't spread FUD

This was in the news some months ago, they have backdoors for 1:1s that they use to comply with government agency and police data requests. Do go look it up.

This has not been found, that would be major news on mainstream channels. (Do go and cite sources.)

If you need some obscure news source for this, it's very unlikely to be true and unless you or a trusted friend of yours has reasonable expertise in the relevant field (reverse engineering or cryptography might be relevant, perhaps both depending on the type of backdoor) you can't rely on some controversial source being correct.

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

#197

Post by xNeil »

ign0ramus wrote: post #80
xNeil wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.

That number seems wildly off. Facebook's annual revenue for 2020 was $85.97 Billion[1]. With 2.8 Billion monthly active users, they'd need to charge $3 a month to exceed that number. [1]: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...

Found the original article, I hope this helps :)

https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-h...

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

#198

Post by tomComb »

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…

> User data will not be used to target ads.

I actually prefer personalized (targeted) ads, as long as it is a company I trust with my data. And they generate more revenue so they would need fewer ads.

I realize people will argue that they don't generate more revenue, but if that were true then how has this whole industry developed around them?

By tossing out personalized ads we are throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

And there are so many truly nasty things going on on the Internet, how has killing personalized ads become one of the defining battles of our times? Heck, even just looking at my ISP the list of nasty things they are doing without much push back or notice is scary.

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

#199

Post by tazjin »

bordercases wrote: post #173
yewenjie wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which ones don't? I used the Android client and telega, both of those do. I believe the iOS one does, too.

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

#200

Post by ZephyrBlu »

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 don't think subscriptions work for every product.

In the case of something ubiquitous like a messaging app, I think ads scale better than subscriptions.

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