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Comment by ObsoleteNerd | Hacker News Reader

I’ve used Telegram for years now, along with almost all my family and friends. I’m a huge fan of it, and it’s basically the only IM I use anymore (other than Signal with some tech friends).

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.

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You're in the minority and pretty much exercising your first-world privileges to dictate what you think the service should do. It's intended to work for everyone across the world, no matter how poor, and I'm 100% sure people from India or Brazil would leave it completely if they had to pay to use the app.

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 would not mind them monetizing large public channels or selling sticker packs. If I ever see ads in my 1:1 or small groups, though, that's the end.

Hulu once wrote about how, by offering a higher cost plan without ads, they removed a lot of the complaints about their service

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.

Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.

it's from their quarterly financial reports. rough estimate. for developing markets they generate about 2$ per user. and in developed markets like $7 per user.

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/...

In the US it's much higher. Many users provide practically no revenue to FB (presumably FB wants the growth for the future).

https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/facebook-made-almost-2...

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.

When Facebook bought WhatsApp for 20 Billion USD, WhatsApp had about 1 Billion users, or slightly less. So that's at least 20 USD per user that Facebook paid.

Facebook does offer a paid option for “companies”, called Workplace. IIRC, it costs $3 per active user per month. I don’t know about feature parity with the surveillance based facebook.com. Of course, Workplace cannot be used with random people that one may interact with across different spheres of life.

Are you happy with services that have ads, but give the option to remove them for a subscription fee?

Not the OP but I'm coming from what sounds like the same place.

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'.

Cool! Thanks for the reply - so you'd feel much more comfortable with a subscription to opt out of all tracking and ads?

Yeah, if I could reasonably verify that the tracking was not occurring. Unfortunately in today's environment, trust is also an issue.

i have zero problems with this kind of monetization. i mean, that's why i pay for youtube and spotify -- i wanna support the services/content creators in some way, but i abhor ads.

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.

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.

Ah I think I confused things. I must’ve responded thinking you were one of the people saying Spotify is essentially worthless to artists. Which is true in a financial sense like YT equivalent things, but yeah, you support in other ways.

I prefer to word it slightly differently - have a paid service that offers a free ad-supported version.

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.

Absolutely. I gladly pay for YouTube Premium, Subscribe to Twitch streamers I like to remove ads there, and other services that do an ad-supported free tier than a premium ad-free tier.

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.

I wonder if you're typical though. Many people will likely be using it along with other IM apps to communicate with colleagues/friends/family and balk at paying even marginal amounts. Perhaps an ad supported model with ad free premium, or free to receive, but pay to send over x messages a month etc.

Whatever they decide they'll likely annoy lots of their users.

>I absolutely despise ads of any kind

Can the business that pays your bills survive without ads?

> 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

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.

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