> Sponsored messages on Telegram are displayed in large public one-to-many channels with 1000+ subscribers and are limited to 160 characters. Sponsored Messages are based solely on the topic of the public channels in which they are shown.
Maybe I'm just not a normal user of telegram and I'm lucky that this doesn't affect me, but this seems like the most reasonable way to do ads. Though something along the lines of discord's nitro would be a nicer way to fund things. I wonder why telegram doesn't do something like that.
> Though something along the lines of discord's nitro would be a nicer way to fund things. I wonder why telegram doesn't do something like that.
I'd guess because paid features quickly exclude people in poorer countries and people that prefer to remain anonymous, both of which are avid telegram users.
Also, remember that WhatsApp choose the same route, despite actually being non-free for quite some time. It might be simply be the better market strategy.
For a lot of people, the price is not the problem, being able to get the money to where it needs to be is.
This is almost never a problem in Silicon Valley and rarely a problem in the US, but most definitely a thing in other countries.
For example, in Poland where I live, we have some really advanced online payments systems that we use locally, but none of them are supported by either App Store or Google Play. Because those systems exist, paying on line with a debit card (credit cards are much less of a thing here) just seems strange, especially if you're 30+, non tech savvy and don't speak English. A lot of people refuse to give their credit card number to anyone because they fear it might be stolen.
There was a survey by one of our audiobook streaming companies (Storytel), and this is indeed a big problem. If I remember correctly, about 90% of users who signed up for an account but churned at the "choose your payment method" step cited "won't pay with a payment card online" as the reason. Since our payment systems aren't compatible with subscriptions, they needed to add a way to subscribe through your phone carrier.
This is probably the reason why What's App never got much traction here. Instead, people went with Messenger, which was always free. It also doesn't require giving out your phone number, something we seem to have more issues with, as compared to Americans for example. What's App is usually known as the app you use to talk to family members abroad, Messenger is the thing you use for everything else.
There are, of course, other reasons why you might not be able to get apps / subscriptions. Being underage is probably the most common one, once again, you probably do have money, but it's probably in cash.
You need to have a phone number to use Telegram, and (at least in the past) they rather aggressively banned "temporary phone number" based registrations. And the default settings expose your real identity to anyone who already has you in their phone book.
So, no - Telegram never did appeal to those who prefer to remain anonymous - at least those of them who paid attention.
WhatsApp was 99p/year or something silly wasn't it? Seems too low for the bottom line to be the reasoning to me (vs. preparing to raise it, image/positioning, or something).
Furries absolutely love Telegram because you can make custom sticker sets very easily, all you need is some PNGs of your fursona expressing a variety of emotions.
The general sentiment I see in the furry fandom is very anti-crypto.
Anecdotally: I use telegram (and have since Facebook purchased WhatsApp) and I am neither purveyor nor purchaser of “crypto scams” or “dodgy nonsense”.
I would sincerely rather pay for Telegram or let them launch unobtrusive ads in channels than have Telegram go the way of WhatsApp and be owned by a large tech company. Telegram is the only messaging app I use that routinely gets tangible and useful feature updates and consistently works fast across all devices. Of course it costs money to maintain, and I’m happy to help keep it going.
If they actually go through with this, most likely I’ll just switch to only using Signal rather than both. Most of my friends use both anyway and the remainder won’t be too hard to convince, and I think we’re not unique in that we already share other apps apart from Telegram (like Discord for example).
This will be the worst decision they’ve made in the history of the product.
You may know, but to be clear: ads will only appear on large public groups, and will be “targeted” based on the groups’s topic. This is the most privacy-respecting way to introduce ads, without taking away (imo) anything from the great platform.
Private chats are not (and promised to be never) affected.
Ok, but Telegram isn't Instagram. It's not even a social network, it's an IM. And while you can talk about lock-in effects with IM applications, I honestly think there's only one where it makes sense, and that's WhatsApp. In many parts of the world WhatsApp is completely synonymous with sending a message or making a call, so not having it cripples you. They enjoy market leadership on account of being the first player in a market that screamed for a solution way back when SMS and call pricing was horrible compared to data (and I guess in some places it still is). I strongly doubt Telegram enjoys any kind of similar effect, the percentage of users that can (and may) drop the app like a hat seems to me to be a lot higher.
Of course, I might be wrong, but the difference I'm trying to get across here is that unless every hair salon and restaurant you go to has Telegram stickers in the window (they don't), it's not comparable to Instagram, because switching to a new IM is for a lot of people like switching channels on a radio, the FOMO of losing all your friends is not as prevalent because people are already using multiple IMs and are much more open to trying new ones than they are trying new social networks, because IMs are "light". They don't want their IMs to be social networks, and the reason some of them are becoming social networks is pretty clear: it helps with user retention and lock-in. It's one of many reasons why Signal deserves praise, they don't bother with that.
How do you think Signal could be funded in the long run? It is clear that optional donation doesn't work in actually getting to a non loss state, let alone being a company who could hire top engineers and invest in some innovation.
I don’t know what you’re implying and your question isn’t asked in good faith. What is your definition of “the long run”? Because apparently seven years is not what you consider long enough. It’s apparently also “clear” that optional donation doesn’t work, but you don’t feel any need to elaborate on why that is clear, or what examples you have that Signal is failing to hire competent engineers or to “innovate”, whatever that means.
You know Signal has raised 50 million dollars when it started, right? And people don't give millions without any expectation of return. Whatsapp had been ad free for longer, but that doesn't mean its plan is just to not earn any revenue.
> people don't give millions without any expectation of return
Perhaps you're not aware but Signal is developed by the Signal Technology Foundation, which is an American non-profit organization. So yes, people do "give millions without any expectation of return".
If the $50M USD you're referring to is the money donated by WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton, it was definitely not given with the expectation of returns, as donations rarely are.
Elon Musk has also confirmed publically that he has donated to Signal:
Tons, and tons. Telegram has a better user experience as well, both in the quality of the apps, and the way features work. Of course, in some cases, signal is a little hamstrung due to their aggressive security model.
Although, I think most of those telegram features are cute little addons and aren't really core to the purpose of the app (messaging).
Personally, I use signal for everything and have gotten my friends on it as well.
Signal doesn't have the benefit of resources that telegram does. Also, they have to build their platform out "correctly" the first time, which makes life much harder.
Maybe instead of focusing on mobilecoin integration they should work on some of these important things. Their credibility already took a dent because of that
Cool stickers. I love the stickers in Telegram. Signal stickers are boring in comparison. I'm sure they can improve it but at the moment Telegram seems to have the best ones.
Now the feature is there for stickers, it is just that the implementation isn't as good.
I did not. I just checked them and I was underwhelmed to be honest. But I'm sure they can get better over time, but at the moment the quality of them isn't up to the level of Telegram's stickers in my opinion.
Copy pasting stuff from TG doesn't bode well for Signal.
Signal merely replicated TG features - Secret chats and made it mainstream.
It uses AWS for cloud hosting, and I don't trust AWS as an intermediary for routing chats. There are red flags all over!! There's nothing new in Signal, AT all!
If I were implemting telegram, the MVP version would be on AWS. Then the "scales to 10M users" version would also be in AWS, but only using EC2 and no deeply integrated Amazon services. Then I'd hire a team to build it on-site for the "scales to 3B users" version of the infra.
The plan seems to have been bootstrapping until they could extract a few billion from the TON blockchain pump and dump. Then TON was ruled illegal so now they're into the "things we promised we'd never do" business model.
now the plan is to get $2m from each ads partner, of which only $1m can be used towards ads and the remaining $1m is a “deposit” which can’t be withdrawn unless you plan to spend $10m
also consider that none of the channels can disable ads nor get any % cut
What's the alternative? Anyone who uses it (the other sort of 'client') is forced to advertise on the platform, like it or not? Isn't that absurd enough to be obviously not what's happening?
> Unfortunately, Telegram cannot financially sustain third-party apps that do not display sponsored messages and they will have to be disconnected.
The whole post could have been summarized to these few words: "Telegram has now joined the club of the apps that have grown of age and need to figure out a way to actually make money".
Which is perfectly understandable. I just think that slamming unsolicited ads in front of people's eyeballs is a very bad and uninspired way of making money - and collecting their data so you can target better ads is even worse.
I'd be happy to pay up to $5 a month for a decent messaging app with relatively high adoption, modern features and a well-supported API to build integrations. And many HN users would probably prefer to pay too.
Unfortunately, we are not the majority of the users. Any fee for a widely adopted app that used to be free would cause a bleeding of users. And, on the long run, Telegram is likely to make more money from advertisers rather a $5 fee.
I'm getting quite sick of this cycle. We keep seeking for products that respect our privacy and do not show us ads. We may find them, we may stick around with them for a while, then at some point they are also like "sorry, now we also need to make money, therefore we'll also add ads/trackers", and then the cycle repeats.
Nobody's infrastructure is free. And while it's understandable, I also don't want to rent somebody else's servers in exchange of ads I didn't ask for. I'd be happier to just pay for the rent, but nobody is providing me with that option. Everyone finds the ads/trackers model more profitable than the subscription model.
I'll try and convince as many friends as I can to switch to NextCloud Talk (if I'm hosting the service then I know that I won't get surprises), but in the meantime we really need to talk about federated apps. A centralized infrastructure to store messages for millions isn't cheap, and eventually anybody who maintains that infrastructure will have to find a way to make a profit (or at least not make a loss) out of it. We need to have smaller and more maintainable "clouds" to connect users to one another. It's insane that we're in 2021, we can deploy services anywhere within seconds, and yet most of the messaging traffic generated by billions still goes through the gateways of 4-5 apps.
p.s. btw, client-line commands like Bitlbee (and any libpurple-based integration) should unaffected, unless they display ads as _actual_ messages (which would be a horrible decision).
> Telegram has now joined the club of the apps that have...
Telegram's client app is Free Software, they actually provide an API, and third party clients are permitted, so I think it's in a rather different club here. I think it'd be fairer to frame this as a requirement of their network and network service, rather than their app.
As far as I know, a paid option is very much the plan of telegram. Strictly only the public groups will get some ads based on the topic (a really privacy-respecting way), and you can opt those out with a paid plan. Private chats will always be free of ads, according to the CEO.
given their customer base, they could provide some dumb whatever extra feature and get that 1$/year that whatsapp used to bill and probably still be profitable (as whatsapp used to be)
If you wonder how they intend to enforce this, Telegram is known for harassing developers until they comply and for making sure "unapproved" forks stay out of the Play and App Stores.
Maybe I'm just not a normal user of telegram and I'm lucky that this doesn't affect me, but this seems like the most reasonable way to do ads. Though something along the lines of discord's nitro would be a nicer way to fund things. I wonder why telegram doesn't do something like that.