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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

#311

Post by skinnymuch »

wdb wrote: post #113
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…

I think Spotify makes their ads purposely annoying to use it as funnel for paid plans. I have the feeling the ads got worse over time so stopped using the app. I normally don't mind listening to the news and commercial breaks on the good old radio.

Yes. Spotify makes very little from the ads. Spotify would like to cripple the payment free version as much as possible. It is only there to move you over to the paid version and possibly as a helpful network effects way.

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

#312

Post by EGreg »

andyjih_ wrote: post #300
EGreg wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is built by an anarchist person who always refused to give out personal info of people to the point where his company was taken from him, and he ran away to France. He and his brother hired a ton of PhDs and made lots of paid challenges that no one could break their encryption. Their software is open sourced. The encryption Moxie Marlinspike uses was conveniently funded by the very US government agencies intereste…

That tweet you linked is from the CEO of Telegram. Seems likely he wants to sow doubt about his competitors.

He is simply pointing out what others have as well - that using the crypto whose development was financed by the very people interested in breaking it, may not be that smart.

And is the story about from Jan about vulnerabilities in Signal that are absent in Telegram also planted by him? Want to see more incidents like that?

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

#313

Post by fernandotakai »

skinnymuch wrote: post #303
fernandotakai wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

probably as small as the money they would get if i was watching ads. but instead of watching them with an adblocker, i just use yt premium.

as i said, i do pay for my fav creators on patreons, because if i started paying for all of them, i wouldn't have money to do anything else.

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

#314

Post by socksy »

Aachen wrote: post #296
golergka wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quickly searching your chat history, going through all your contacts and group chats, 8 years back, without the need to downloading all that history to your device and building a search index first is a killer feature. Wouldn't it be impossible to implement without trusting the server with plaintext?

I wouldn't mind not having that feature of searching so far back instantly on a new device. How often do you login to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time? I get that it's nice but... is that necessary? There are various solutions to the problem of storing and searching history with different trade-offs. One of them is having the server store and be able to read everythi…

Communicating with the majority of my friends through telegram, and having access to the records of all of our conversations, has revolutionised my usage with computing. I use the "saved messages" (previously messaging yourself) to act as an append only log of info I need to search, and unlike emailing myself the UX is actually good. Search is extremely fast, and the fact I can see all the photos I ever sent someone has come in handy a huge number of times

For this reason alone, I can't really see myself switching to an amnesiac client... not unless something else came along that has the ease of use of making all this accessible for me.

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

#315

Post by barbazoo »

bryan_w wrote: post #262
barbazoo wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But if telegram sells to FB or someone worse, you will be in a worse position as now they will not only have your metadata, but also the full text of your messages. It doesn't make since to move away from one company for privacy reasons onto another company with even worse privacy.

That's right. I don't think I said otherwise.

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

#316

Post by ign0ramus »

xNeil wrote: post #197
ign0ramus wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Thanks for digging it up! It did help. As Slymon99 had pointed out, Facebook doesn't earn the same amount from each user. Something I hadn't taken into account.

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

#317

Post by corobo »

skinnymuch wrote: post #308
corobo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Fuck knows, I only remember it starting as a telegram group.

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

#318

Post by boring_twenties »

einpoklum wrote: post #301
boring_twenties wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not just the name, but connecting to their server. Regarding the name, he's certainly well within his rights to enforce his trademark. I take no issue with that. Easy enough for LibreSignal to have used a non-infringing name.

As to the server claim, frankly it seems to me that that claim by Moxie is without any basis. The license clearly allows redistribution modified or unmodified, so redistributing the unmodified default server setting would seem to be legit. IANAL, though.

Even failing that, the libre app could have removed the default server altogether and made every user enter the address manually. What could Moxie possibly do about that? I'm saddened that they decided to back off.

I know Moxie has a lot of street cred in the security community but honestly after reading that thread years ago I have trouble seeing him as anything other than a bullshitter and an asshole. (What "benefit" does he imagine the LibreSignal authors would derive from their 100% free app, anyway? It's the potential users that he's screwing, not the devs...) I decided I'm never going to run any binaries from him, period. If he ever changes his mind and gets the official Signal app into the main F-Droid repository, I'll consider that. Until then (ha!), you won't find me on Signal.

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

#319

Post by orbifold »

7v3x3n3sem9vv wrote: post #278
EGreg wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So weird I personally would trust Telegram way more than even Signal for encryption. Armchair sneering doesnt count for me

Why do you trust Telegram more than Signal?

Signal is a US company and „do not roll your own crypto“ is an NSA meme. It translates to „only use crypto we probably know how to compromise“. That doesn’t mean the algorithm itself must be wrong, it could just be that the implementation has subtle bugs.

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

#320

Post by postmodernbrute »

vondro wrote: post #291
meibo wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I get why Signal's approach can be unpopular, but I don't understand the fascination with Telegram to be honest. Sure, the Android app is nice and fluid, but if I needed to use an app that is not e2e encrypted, I can use sms, or Facebook Messenger. Both have much wider adoption than Telegram.

Facebook Messenger is tied to Facebook. Which is necessarily tied to a real name identity. Ditto for SMS. Telegram on the other hand is only minimally connected to a phone number (only need to be used once), with no real name requirements. It offers sufficient anonymity while allowing public gatherings. And of course, Facebook is much more likely to cooperate with law enforcement & national security apparatus in any given country compared to Telegram.

Telegram now has 550 million users according to the article. Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion users - more twice as many, but I won't call that a "much wider adoption".

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