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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

#301

Post by einpoklum »

boring_twenties wrote: post #279
jakecopp wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> At least on the desktop, the UX of element is pretty bad IMHO. I agree it can be slow as it's web based, but could I ask why you find the UX bad? I'd be interested in helping improve it. > Signal is FOSS. It appears to be abandoned: https://linuxreviews.org/Signal_Appears_To_Have_Abandoned_Th... The signal client may be FOSS, but alternative clients are not allowed to use the Signal server. As Signal is not federat…

The Signal client may be open source, but it's not free. It purports to be distributed under the GPL, but if you actually try to avail yourself of the primary benefit of the GPL -- the right to modify the software and distribute your modified version -- you get what you see in your own [1].

Oh, you mean they're being anal about the name? Ugh. That reminds me of years of Debian (and others ?) quibbling with Mozilla over this stuff.

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

#302

Post by einpoklum »

jakecopp wrote: post #253
einpoklum wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Signal is FOSS. Telegram is partially FOSS (the client). 2. At least on the desktop, the UX of element is pretty bad IMHO. It's slow and feels like a web browser (and it probably is something like that under the hood, I would bet). Telegram feels much nicer (but only as an instant messaging app; you can't make it look and feel like IRC for chatting, while Element can be twisted to partially resemble an IRC client)…

> At least on the desktop, the UX of element is pretty bad IMHO. I agree it can be slow as it's web based, but could I ask why you find the UX bad? I'd be interested in helping improve it. > Signal is FOSS. It appears to be abandoned: https://linuxreviews.org/Signal_Appears_To_Have_Abandoned_Th... The signal client may be FOSS, but alternative clients are not allowed to use the Signal server. As Signal is not federat…

Thanks for letting me know about Signal. That's pretty bad.

About abandonment - has Signal LLC announced anything about this? Reading that thread you linked to sounds rather ominous; i.e. that they're making an effort to prevent any modifications or adaptations from being meaningfully usable. I guess things haven't improved since then?

> but could I ask why you find the UX bad? I'd be interested in helping improve it.

Will email you about this, since it's veering too far off topic.

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

#303

Post by skinnymuch »

fernandotakai wrote: post #171
fakedang wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You’re essentially not helping the YouTube creators from the numbers they’ve given on their payout from Premium. It is incredibly small.

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

#304

Post by zie »

sangnoir wrote: post #268
gaius_baltar wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is nothing, technically, that he can do to prevent third party clients. That's the same thing we did in the times of ICQ, AOL and MSN Messenger. And there is an actual demand for features not provided by the official client, as stated by the amount of PRs contributed by non-Signal developers waiting in their GitHub repo, so people will continue to come with their own changes.

> There is nothing, technically, that he can do to prevent third party clients. There are plenty of technical ways of detecting and blocking 3rd party clients (using both in-channel and side-channel, uh, signals); the only challenge is that it becomes a never-ending arms-race

and the clients are open source[0], so unless the close source it, the arms race is mostly in commit speed. :)

0: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commits/master

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

#305

Post by skinnymuch »

Aachen wrote: post #188
cyrksoft wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This trope keeps being repeated. It isn’t true. Whatsapp was on and off charging iPhone users $1 one time vs being free. Android users got the first year free then a small fraction paid $1 once or $1/year.

Most probably estimates are that 5% of Android users ever paid. While a bigger possibly majority fraction paid $1 for the iPhone app.

It wasn’t sustainable.

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

#306

Post by skinnymuch »

iso8859-1 wrote: post #89
ignoramous wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, that route is not so easy. People in Latin American countries can't really afford to pay for apps. AdGuard and Cloudflare (at least for Warp+) adjust their monthly and annual subscription rates based on location. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index

This incentivizes inequality. I live in Mexico, earning 10x more than most, yet I could pay less.

Yeah. Similarly, people pay for many services, Apple, Netflix, these, by switching locations. It isn’t exactly fair either for people on the poverty line in the US to pay the US prices when other places don’t have to.

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

#307

Post by skinnymuch »

tw04 wrote: post #20
szszrk wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A paid telegram would be crippled from large part userbase. I would not be able to convince anyone from friends and family to use it if it were paid - they can't see the value before installing. Without them I would not pay for it as well.

I don't see that as being a hurdle. You make the first year free which, IIRC, is what whatsapp did.

WhatsApp made every year free for 90%+ of Android users. Maybe 95%+. It is hard to find people who paid for Android Whatsapp. Even more so paying more than once.

So that doesn’t work to make money.

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

#308

Post by skinnymuch »

corobo wrote: post #30
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".

Especially when there's Telegram groups that are charging $10/mo to get into haha. Advertising and privacy don't mix. e: I was wrong, it's $20/mo (wip.co)

Isn’t wip.co telegram a secondary feature? The payment is for the community at large. Namely the website, no?

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

#309

Post by bordercases »

tazjin wrote: post #261
bordercases wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For sure: Linux.

I use telega on Linux, I guess this is the Qt-based desktop client?

People keep name-dropping telega but it isn't an official client. I am referring to the official QT client.

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

#310

Post by skinnymuch »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #281
elastolin wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ~1$/month, I don't do anything heavy, text messaging only Won't work. The vast majority people don't pay for messaging service, and without people, there's no messaging app. Ads are the only way forward. Will they offer an optional ad-free subscription? Maybe, but I wouldn't count on that, and it's likely to be higher than $1/month. > So, the day I get ads in Telegram I'm leaving Nobody cares.

> Nobody cares I have stimulated many people to switch to Telegram because it is the best and all you have is to try it, realize that and motivate your friends to switch with you. Obviously many of these people will go with me once I find a better alternative. The situation probably is the same for many other people.

Nobody cares is an exaggeration, but correct spiritual point for the grandstanding a minority of HN users make about always leaving X or Y or never joining Z because of situations like you mentioned. Yet nothing actually changes in the real word because of how much of a niche minority these people are.
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