Telegram is booming but needs advertisers and $700M soon
wsj.com
wsj.com
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 introduced ads, with an option to pay a subscription to remove them? Here’s my…well, it’s Telegram, so here’s my cryptocurrency, I guess…but here’s my money.
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 with relatively few resources. [1]
Telegram messages reside on their servers. This allows for features such as those discussed above - multiple synchronized clients etc. The downside (aside from potential privacy concerns) is that it requires much larger amount of infrastructure, which presumably is one of the reasons they need $700 million.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/3/31/how-whatsapp-grew-...
And now they've had a decade to address the issue.
Telegram is not E2E encrypted, WhatsApp is.
Telegram has the option of E2E encrypted messages, but that then works only from one phone/PC.
I have never used backup for WhatsApp but just the other day, out of the blue, every conversation from late 2017 to now that I had deleted popped back into my inbox.
Can’t explain that one easily
The other thing it's got going for it is that its protocol is designed to work in low-bandwidth environments. Yeah, the protocol looks crazy - but it really does work. Imagine being on an underground train and only occasionally getting a few seconds of internet while passing a stop: Most messengers will at most start showing you a "Connecting ..." status, Telegram will do a full state sync (minus media files, of course) in the same time.
You just register callbacks for message lists / chat messages and notifications and you're all set.
This allows people to easily build full-featured clients for pretty much any platform and it makes it easy for everyone to keep up. Very smart platform design.
I'm very disappointed that something made to be more open like Signal completely failed in this aspect and has ended being a walled garden with poor quality clients.
https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
He explicitly says he doesn't want other clients to use their infra.
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 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
0: https://github.com/signalapp/Signal-Android/commits/master
That’s my point, I’m sorry if you consider some wording five years ago is more relevant than what’s going on in present time.
Of course, it could be reversed, and if you find any more-recent official welcomes from Signal for third-party clients to use its servers, I'd love references.
Many of Telegram's official clients do not support Secret Chat, an issue which has been open for at least five years now. Their community picks up the slack.
And I have actually experienced this, fairly frequently.
T-Mobile international roaming, at least on my provided corporate plan, is throttled to 128kbps. And Telegram works. Messages come through quickly, and it seems fairly smart about deferring media loading.
It's about the right UX choices. Speed is a first-tier feature.
It depends on your needs.
I use Telegram like an IRC client, primarily participating in medium/large (20-200 user) group chats. In that sense, I don't really care about encryption because the channels are semi-public anyway. I just want whatever client gives me the best experience.
(On the other hand, if I were discussing sensitive topics, I'd probably pick something else.)
…yes, I am aware Telegram does not use the absolute best practices, and at the very least, I imagine it can be cracked wide open by a nation-state intelligence agency.
Which is why, for my occasional super-secret must-be-hush-hush chats, I use other clients. For my day-to-day chats? Telegram. Because, to be privileged, to be flippant: the NSA is welcome to read my texts about what I’m buying at Target this afternoon.
I personally would trust Telegram way more than even Signal for encryption.
Armchair sneering doesnt count for me
https://surveillancevalley.com/blog/government-backed-privac...
https://twitter.com/durov/status/872891017418113024?s=21
Or if you want just a track record of the most RECENT bugs and backdoors that were exploited, look two months ago:
https://www.helpnetsecurity.com/2021/01/21/bugs-video-chat-a...
Find me the same for Telegram!
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?
- 100x more people use it (I joined Signal years ago and I still have 1 actual conversation)
- The speed and the level of polish is unmatched
Of course for any serious Signal user it isn't an alternative but for many of us we only use it for postcard level anyway.
They have the opportunity and a need for profit from a smaller advertising base.
I'd bet on it actually: in a few years we'll get a big fuss when Telegram reveals their new targeted advertising functionality...
For now Durov has kept his word for 7 years which is a whole lot longer than most. He was also clear from the start that he would, if necessary, find a non intrusive way to fund it and I feel he might be onto it.
WhatsApp was great too right up till Facebook bought it.
Anyone who buys Telegram is buying those servers and any messages you have stored on them.
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/
I'm thinking this may be a messaging issue rather than a technical bug in some cases - `Unable to decrypt: The sender's device has not sent us the keys for this message` isn't very helpful.
I think while this isn't ideal, it's important to note (for those following along) that neither Signal, Telegram or WhatsApp support end-to-end encryption across desktop and mobile, history syncing to new devices, and a self hosted OSS server with multiple client apps.
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".
A large part of the world can't afford sending images (and even videos) via SMS.
And no, Facebook Messenger is not fluid, it's laggy as fuck.
It's so bizarre indeed that it actually looks suspicious.
If I was alright with Telegram's non-E2EE conversations, I would prefer WhatsApp for its wider adoption among my contact base.
> when avoiding Telegram's non-private conversations
Telegram's native Mac app (https://macos.telegram.org/) supports E2E-encrypted secret chats. Their cross platform Qt-based app (https://desktop.telegram.org/) does not support this feature.
Notably, the experience in a Telegram secret chat behaves differently then regular chats. A secret chat is tied to one device; you can't start a secret chat on your phone and pick it up on your tablet/desktop. There's also no server-side message history. Regular (non-secret) chats don't have these limitations.
That's my only gripe. The rest of the app is incredible, and absolutely the most delightful app I use every day. I cite it often as an example of a native app that beats the pants off of anything Electron-based, it's just so damn fast.
There will be ads in channels that opt in (but those already have sponsored posts in some form already often, only manually inserted.)
So, some will say: how long before they change their terms again and the ui is plastered with ads?
We'll see. So far Durov has kept his words to a degree that few others have.
Edit: I also think Telegram has dropped the cryptocurrency-idea now.
Just because most Americans or even most people in the world think the vileness of R-rated stuff is inevitable and harmless doesn’t make them right. It absolutely warps your view of humanity and imho many ppl today suffer from PTSD and don’t even realize it, just thinking their altered brain chemistry is a normal part of life. The trauma that a constant diet of porn and violence does to your brain is significant and damaging, whether consumed in a pub in 1700s Germany or a random website today.
There are no secret chats though.
I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I've built out a pretty decent social network on there, and run a dozen or so specialty community chats. I'd be glad to pay them something, 25 a year or so, even if I don't get anything special from it (though, if I did want something, it'd be better access to support if I should need it), just as part of making the service sustainable.
It'd made coordination in my life so much easier, and I legitimately cannot fathom going thru the pandemic without it, it's been my social lifeline.
Mostly I love it because its a desktop has parity environment, I literally sit in front of a computer 12+ hours a day, why do I want to limit myself to a phone-only service.
It is (was?) getting super super fishy, given that everything is plain text (they have some tricks to claim it's not, but the bottom line is that they can read all your chats except that experimental "secret" chat or two you might have). If I can start to pay for the service, perhaps it's worth considering, though the lack of encryption is almost equally worrying. The branding is privacy, but the reality is the exact opposite, and while there used to be hope that they would eventually implement it, I've given up on any encryption being forthcoming by now.
Perhaps I'm alone, but I never really wanted a secret chat service, I merely wanted a modern AIM, with first class mobile and desktop support.
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 everything since the dawn of time. I'm not a big fan of this one.
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.
Look at Wire, I can instantly search for arbitrary parts of words (no indexing going on as far as I can tell) and it returns results somewhere between instantly and a second or two depending on how far down the thousands upon thousands of messages the result is. It's end to end encrypted and doesn't use any homomorpic encryption magic (not sure if that's production-ready yet, but if it is, they don't use it here). It's all local and in a browser at that, no need for some special optimized C code either.
There are definitely solutions here that support exactly what you want without requiring plaintext server access. We just need to use them.
Did you move the "specialty community chats" over from another site like Reddit? Do you talk with people you know IRL on it? Mainly just wondering how you built out a social network for yourself on Telegram.
just wondering thanks!
I do indeed talk with many people on it that I otherwise know in real life, often it goes the other way, I meet people via the service, then we eventually meet in real life.
Most, but not all, are furry fandom oriented, and telegram really fills a hole left by the closure of other instant messaging services. To give you an idea, I run about a dozen chats on there, with around 1400 unique users.
If telegram were to go away, many of us would move to discord, IRC, or a mix of both.
The community has the ability to host its own services, and I've given thought what to do if a shutdown looks likely. Had the telegram server side code been open sourced, we'd likely spin up our own service. While we do have the skills internally to reimplement the server side components it'd be a pretty large amount if work to do so. My hope is that if TG did shut down, they'd open source their service side implementation.
In many ways, it reminds me of the Web 0.x days on which the HN crowd so frequently reminisces.
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 chats are and will always be ad-free. As I outlined in December, ads are being considered only in large one-to-many channels (like this one), which do not exist in any other messaging app. So users ditching older apps for Telegram won’t increase the number of ads in their lives.
2. User data will not be used to target ads. We believe that collecting private data from users to target ads the way WhatsApp-Facebook do is immoral. We like the approach of privacy-conscious services like DuckDuckGo: monetizing services without collecting information about users. So if we introduce ads in one-to-many-channels, they will be contextual – based on the topic of the channel, not targeted based on any user data.
3. We are fixing ads that are already here. In most markets, content creators on Telegram already monetize their content by selling promotional posts in their channels. This is a chaotic market with multiple third-party ad networks pushing intrusive ads that create a negative user experience. We want to fix this situation by offering a privacy-conscious alternative for channel owners.
Users will be able to opt out of ads, but I do think that privacy-conscious ads are a good way for channel owners to monetize their efforts – as an alternative to donations or subscriptions, which we are also working to offer them.
Our end goal is to establish a new class of content creators – one that is financially sustainable and free to choose the strategy that is best for their subscribers. Traditional social networks have exploited users and publishers for far too long with excessive data collection and manipulative algorithms. It’s time to change this.
Maybe if they really do grow 1:many channels to actually be competitive to FB products they could charge businesses for API access to provide customer support & empower company:1 user messaging.
Kind of more like Twitter which doesn't have a ton of user data to target ads as well - though Twitter does allow audience matching, if Telegram allowed matching to user phones that would be valuable.
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.
There are lots of companies that have a history of never selling, losing, leaking etc. their users' data, such as Apple & Google. So why is it one of the defining battles of our times to force Google etc. to show me less relevant (and therefore more) ads, versus, say, stopping my ISP from its obviously irresponsible practices?
I think personalized ads are overvalued and their price is driven up by either global conglomerates that are looking to make vast amounts of money from small margins or startups with VC cash to burn. I've never heard an organic business success story about adwords.
If it were so obvious that targeted ads increase revenue, you’d think that the advertising industry would be able to prove it. They can’t.
To you, it’s obviously superior. But if it were obviously generating more revenue, the ad industry would easily be able to prove it. They can’t.
I know the chances goes to 0% if it's for authentic, period correct, women's laderhozen. If it's a book about data science, then there's a good chance I'll click through. Of course, this is all anecdotal, especially since I always had ad block on back in the days before targeted ads, and have never really been subjected to ads that's weren't somehow related to me or the immediate context. If you've ever been around a child, you know how much targeted ads can work. They want the toys that they see. Showing them ads of Bentleys won't result in any sales.
I would recommend talking to someone that does A/B testing.
Can you name an ad company you personally would trust?
The only way to to be accountable to users is to remove the profit motive, or charge a fee to use.
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 appearing on any device in my household. I’m totally happy to (and do) pay for useful services/content but if you don’t give me the choice of paying and just stick ads in it then it’ll disappear off my devices instantly.
In theory yes but does the ad SDK used by the app still gather data on me, even though the ads are turned off/app is paid for? Without clear indication that it will not, the answer for me is 'no'.
so paying for youtube premium gives me an ad-free experience while also helping content creators.
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.
The danger, of course, is that once you separate it out like that you quickly realize that the advertisers want the paying customers, not the freeloaders and so ads encroach on the he payment plans, too.
Other replies to me are reading me wrong, I didn't say "I hate ads therefore I believe no one should ever use ads", I said "I hate ads and would happily pay for me to personally not see them". Telegram can fill their apps with ads if they want, for those that can't/won't pay, as long as there's an option for us to pay and not see them.
Can the business that pays your bills survive without ads?
Whatever they decide they'll likely annoy lots of their users.
Having non-targeted ads and, potentially, premium features that you can pay for is an optimal middle ground for an app of this size.
I've always wondered if FB offered a similar option -- $5 or $10 a month to opt out of all adds and tracking -- if a lot of the complaints about their service would also disappear.
[1]: https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/facebook-made-almost-2...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-h...
No one cares, my man. This position is so off the grid that your anti-ad cruzade will likely have 0 impact in the real world.
They can also do what companies like Steam and Netflix do, charge a differentiated fee by country. Some games which cost 20 US dollars might cost less than 2 US dollars in countries like Argentina (Steam)
So - third world countries can't pay a subscription, and for USA its just not worth it because hardly anyone would pay $50+ a year to use Facebook.
Catch 22.
AdGuard and Cloudflare (at least for Warp+) adjust their monthly and annual subscription rates based on location.
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).
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.
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.
I have friends who had switched to other messaging apps instead of paying WhatsApp 1€/year or whatever it was, and by any measure I live in a rich country and paying 1€/year for my friends would have been pretty much completely irrelevant economically.
They have 550M MAU, using a freemium model and assuming a 1% payment conversion, that's 5.5M monthly paying users. With a price ranging $1 to $10, that can be $66M ~ $660M ARR, at least they can try.
1% conversion to paid at $120/year sounds high for a consumer-focused app particularly popular in developing countries whose competitors are free and whose competitive advantage is supposed to be that the app doesn't know who you are. And that's apparently less than they need to pay the bills, never mind justify their valuation.
Without them I would not pay for it as well.
To the family member, it's free (of course, you do tell them you're paying). But when they find that it's good, they would also pay to recommend it to their friends.
So that doesn’t work to make money.
So looks like ads is the only other option left for now.
I'm curious about how Telegram will decide what ads to show, how heavily it will try and personalize them; will the ads be relevant to the channel you are in or follow you around Telegram.
FWIW, personally, I like the idea of a choice of ads or paid subscription best.
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.
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.
People will go only if there's another service that's good enough and has enough user density. You may find the best privacy-oriented, ad-free messaging app, but if it's empty or if it's hard to use, it's essentially useless.
By this point, it's hard to compete with the behemoths like WhatsApp or Telegram and people will not care about this nearly as much as you do. So, no, it's not 'obvious' at all.
Most of the people I know have less than 10 contacts they actually care about and communicate regularly and it is not hard to convince the most of them to install an app you would sincerely recommend.
If a new app ever manages to become big (as in, Telegram-level big, let alone WhatsApp), it would take years of raising money and marketing. And how would they pay for that exactly? You think people pay a mensual/anual fee for a messaging apps when there are free alternatives? No, the answer is, again, ads. That or selling user data, which is much worse.
You're too focused on the tech, but you have no understanding of how business works.
I wonder if that leads to them balking at the reality that once you start charging money you'll lose a % of your users (which should be normal and fine!)
It shouldn't be normal and fine, because a large part of the value derived from social apps is the network of people using the app.
Charging money means adding friction, which will mean a lot less people use the app and thus it's value is significantly reduced.
I could be wrong but I believe this is a popular reason for Telegram's appeal.
How many of those would be comfortable trusting Telegram with payment details, rather than just a pseudonym?
Yes, countless VPN providers do need your payment details. And that is a risk. The comfort in that risk however is that anyone with knowledge of your VPN payment still doesn't know what you did with that VPN. With a messaging app however, you are risking your entire online identity.
Advertising and privacy don't mix.
e: I was wrong, it's $20/mo (wip.co)
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.
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.
I know Bitcoin and the like exist, but you're vastly increasing the attack surface to identify someone.
I would pay for a good messaging app, but most people wouldn't, and a messaging app most people don't use is a bad messaging app.
Telegram has many nerdy hobby communities which could buy the cosmetics or whatever and subsidise the service for the normal users.
There's an "unlocked" 4K one if you want to pay $10 a month but I still only use a 1080p (at 144Hz) monitor, so I'm very happy to pay the small amount
In the case of something ubiquitous like a messaging app, I think ads scale better than subscriptions.
- ads will be only on very large public channels and not on all public channels
- there won’t be any ads in chats
- the ads will be contextual, and not based on tracking or profiling users and their activity
- users will be able to opt out of ads
Other monetization options like donations and subscriptions are also in the works.
His channel is at https://t.me/durov
Personally, I wouldn’t mind paying a modest fee for this service.
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.
(Throwaway because I work in ad tech and don’t want this sentiment linked to my employer)
Eg. My personal experience with buying products (food, software, SaaS, etc) based on ads conditioned me to actively distrust products that are heavily advertised compared to stuff that's just mentioned in reddit threads or used by friends. Would I be a good fit for ads?
Few people making $30,000 a year are going to pay to disable ads. many people making $200,000 or more are going to consider it.
Marketing works. How do you think your friends learned about product that are mentioned in reddit threads? Guarantee it wasn't organic. If the company was launched in the last 10 years, it was built on VC dollars used to spend tens to hundreds millions in marketing.
Of course, not everyone is that way, but ads have different objectives, and they are effective.
The goal is to nonconsensually force their message on people who don't want it.
Fuck these people.
Advertisers don’t want to be spending money to reach people who will never buy their product, either because they hate their ad or because they don’t have money, but unfortunately there is no way to know who these people are in advance. Spending $10/month to not look at text ads is a sure fire way to signal you have money so you aren’t in the later camp, and people who hate ads with a passion and won’t respond to them are rare in the wild (hn nonwithstanding :D)
Too many people think they can monetize by just “sprinkle some ads on it” without thinking about why an advertiser would buy those ads.
> and that’s who they want to advertise to
is just a fancy way of saying "targeting". What I think you're saying is that it's not people who want ad-free experiences that are being targeted. Rather, those people belong to a broader group -- those with money to spend -- who are being targeted.
What part of the post you replied to indicates nonconsensual?
They want sales, or signups or whatever acronym they need to force up. Group A converts at 10%. Group B at 1%. The advertiser may have a theory of why these groups are different. Increasingly, we don't. FB, especially, does a lot of automated targeting.
Marketers tend to have good instincts about these things, because patterns are repetitive and simple. That said, I'm pretty confident that advertising to subscribers would be more effective than advertising to non subscribers.
In my mind, "person who subscribed to a thing online" is just a good qualifier. It probably correlates to a lot of other qualities like "shops online often" or whatnot. Those "theories" don't really matter though. They're just a starting point.
Advertisers don't know or care what people think of the ads nor how they make the 98.3% who didn't buy anything feel. All they know is that they didn't click/buy/whatever.
I think people imagine online advertisers like a geekier version of mad men. It isn't like that. There's not the pretensions of understanding or influencing psychology. It's more like stock trading.
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 than they could ever make in subs. You don't want to pursue an ad-based strategy that excludes the possibility of a win like that, even if it's a long shot.
I normally don't mind listening to the news and commercial breaks on the good old radio.
For spotify this is tolerable. Network effects exist, but they aren't everything. For telegram, network effects are the whole thing.
"Freemium" doesn't usually work the way people think it does. "Just let me pay to remove ads" is rarely good business advice. If your business model is ads, you stick with ads. If your business model is subs, you might have an ad-supported version for other reasons.
Even in old media, paid channels/papers/etc. still have ads. They don't make an ad free version.
And then you have adverse selection putting downward pressure on the revenue per free user.
As you previously stated, revenue is not distributed evenly. For sake of argument, the actual numbers for 5 users could be: 120, 30, 0, 0, 0 . The ad-free subscriber would not pay the average profit, they would need to pay the average profit of a paid subscriber. If we assume only the whales would pay for an ad-free experience, they would need to pay $10/month and not $2.50.
First, I think facebook's global revenue per user is $30. US should be much higher. My back-of the envelope has it @ $225 per year currently ($43bn revenue from 190m users)... I may be wrong. Don't hurt me.
Second, they make $225 (or $30) per user while also maintaining a very high number of users. You can't expect to put up a paywall and not lose users. So, to reach parity, you need to charge enough for subs to replace those.
For FB, it's flat impossible. That's why I picked it as an example. You cannot have 190 million americans as paying users at any price. You definitely can't have that many @ $20 per month.
Practices I don't like: - Making sponsored searches look like regular searches. - Pay to Play, where your content gets demoted if not a paid subscriber (Thinking of a non-google websites here).
Besides, as I said in another comment, ads will only exist in channels. Channels have already sold ads directly since about forever.
Also: https://t.me/durov/153
I pay 12EUR/yr for email, it's ad-free and works. Happy to do the same arrangement for a IM service.
Why don't more people use it? I can't understand why people would jump from one closed source silo like WhatsApp to another closed source Silo like Telegram or Signal.
The UX of Element is terrific now.
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). Signal is closer to where Element is at, in my experience.
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 federated, hosting other servers is not possible. Below is a message by the creator of Signal `moxie0`:
> I'm not OK with LibreSignal using our servers, and I'm not OK with LibreSignal using the name "Signal." You're free to use our source code for whatever you would like under the terms of the license, but you're not entitled to use our name or the service that we run. [1]
> If you think running servers is difficult and expensive (you're right), ask yourself why you feel entitled for us to run them for your product.
[1]: https://github.com/LibreSignal/LibreSignal/issues/37#issueco...
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.
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.
1. Low volume during calls
2. The UI needs work.
Like for example, I click on my contact messages. To call that contact. I now have to select a ... menu item. Or once I start typing a message, the option to attach photos disappears.
Telegram can have the best privacy policy, but they can always read your messages. You have to trust Telegram to do the right thing. (Except those few who opt in to use encrypted chats.)
Compared to maybe-evil-in-the-future WhatsApp, default Telegram is already evil, because they have access to all communication right now. What do (or will) they do with all that data?
(Opt-in E2E - and only for 1-on-1 chats - is almost useless. Encryption should be the default.)
If your threat model includes WhatsApp/Telegram developers, you can't use WhatsApp but you can actually (carefully) use Telegram's E2E chats, because Telegram's client is an open-source app with reproducible builds. E2E in a closed-source app is useless, and all UX inconveniences of E2E are just "security theater".
Sure, open source WhatsApp would be better. However, we are comparing detectable potential backdoor with totally undetectable existing access to all non E2E chats on Telegram servers. Telegram developers can already see everything right now. (By the way, opt-in E2E encryption is almost useless. Encryption should be the default, and enabled for group chats too.)
Between these two options WhatsApp situation is clearly better.
- That backdoors are routinely detectable in closed-source applications. They are not just "not easily" detectable, they are impossible to detect without a good amount of luck, and even so, the knowledge about a new backdoor will come after years, after all of the damage was done. Numerous discovered RCEs in Windows, some of which laid there for more than a decade after being found, confirm this.
- That there are incentives for security researchers to routinely disassemble WhatsApp binary and provide results of their inspection to the public, and not just report to employers or use the knowledge about a Facebook-authored backdoor to blackmail Facebook. There are none.
If you discard these two assumptions, you can see that Telegram model is better because it gives users clear choice between passing data to Telegram (in exchange for chat sync) and using E2E, with strong guarantees of E2E that are backed by reproducible builds, not by trusting Facebook or "oh, but that would be a scandal". The "almost useless" E2E of Telegram (I don't see how it's almost useless, it's there, it's working, and it provides value for users) is better than the completely useless E2E of WhatsApp.
(But yeah, group chats have no option of E2E in Telegram, that sucks.)
- I'm not saying backdoors are "routinely" detectable, I'm simply saying it's possible to detect them. In contrast, we have zero possibility to find out if Telegram is doing something nasty with your chats. Telegram may well do it already, and we may never learn.
- Regarding the incentives - security researchers often disclose vulnerabilities to the public. Obviously they have the incentives to do it.
As for the optional nature of Telegram E2E encryption - Signal and WhatsApp successfully demonstrated it's possible to make E2E the default (and only) option. There's no competition here. I wonder what proportion of Telegram users understand the ramifications. Many people migrating from WhatsApp to Telegram probably don't.
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.
It doesn't make since to move away from one company for privacy reasons onto another company with even worse privacy.
2. I could have a hard time choosing between Signal and Telegram some days. With WhatsApp I know Facebook will do metadata analysis on my contacts and my conversations (possible even with E2E-encryption). They'll also upload some or all my messages unencrypted to Google if I or any of my contacts enable backups.
Does that explain it?
E2E is an insurance against:
* bugs
* rogue employee
* server vulnerabilities
* acquisitions (imagine Telegram being acquired by Facebook)
As for metadata analysis, I still fail to understand how is it comparable to Telegram having access to all messages.
IMHO Telegram has the best UI and UX of all other "family friendly" chat app.
I do agree on the Voice and Video calls that need more improvement.
Which is the real rub. Paying for a product is no guarantee that your data won't be misused anyway. It's incremental money for the taking for any enterprise.
There is also third party software for it that has more options, the internal one is a bit limited. Some are based on tg-cli, so they're not redoing the work of implementing a client but just format the history into an archive format. I think the project that I contributed to (years ago) was called something like Telegram history formatter.
Backups of your data are always a good idea, regardless of who owns it. Triply so if the service is a bit shady (no business model, for instance). I learned that lesson the hard way with Grooveshark (which totally had a business model and did basically the same as YouTube till someone found evidence of the authors uploading copyrighted stuff themselves, but until then it seemed more stable than Telegram seems today).
Thank you!
As for the other question, what dont__panic said also goes for me. I'm trying to switch to Signal but it's such a drag compared to tg, the UX is so bad (and it's the best among encrypted messengers that I've found) it's hard to convince even myself let alone whole groups.
Turn off "Include muted chats in unread count" and "count unread messages". They are under the "Badge Counter" section.
I'd be okay with this, as long as there's an anonymous way of paying.
And let me implement my own payment provider for bots because the Telegram ones suck.
I signed up in 2014, basically the first or second time it hit HN, and over time, I've built out a pretty decent social network on there, and run a dozen or so specialty community chats. I'd be glad to pay them something, 25 a year or so, even if I don't get anything special from it (though, if I did want something, it'd be better access to support if I should need it), just as part of making the service sustainable.
This kind of value proposition is exactly why crypto ads aren't permitted on many ad platforms. There are too many fly by night operators selling snake oil to the desperate and the greedy. Why would an advertiser assume liability for that?