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