Telegram hits 900M users and nears profitability as founder considers IPO | Hacker News Reader

Telegram hits 900M users and nears profitability as founder considers IPO

ft.com

13 pointsfwn22 comments

> the company, which only has about 50 full-time employees

I’ve not seen a company of this size (in this space) really add features at the pace Telegram has been doing for several years. Except for the lack of end-to-end encryption in personal chats by default (and the lack of E2EE for group chats altogether), it’s a fantastic platform for chat. No other platform comes close to it on features and speed. The rest of them have been and continue to be years behind.

What do you mean by no E2EE in personal chats?

GP here. I said by default it’s not there. There’s the “secret chats” feature that is E2EE, but it has to be explicitly chosen by the user. The default chats are stored on Telegram’s servers in a way Telegram can decrypt those. Secret chats are also tied to a single device. There is no “secret chat”/E2EE available for group chats, unlike in Signal.

By default there's no encryption and in order to have an encrypted chat you need to initialize it manually from the contact menu and IIRC it's not available on desktop - you won't initialize it from PC nor it will be synchronized with

It's available for desktop MacOS FWIW

Looks like it's just a matter of time when I have to find an alternative then. Making a good service for the users and turning profit for shareholders are typically mutually exclusive goals.

At the moment it isn't bad - the subscription ad bar shows once per year I believe. But locking voice messages in privacy settings behind paywall isn't nice. It seems they also locked text messages from everyone behind premium quite recently because I'm pretty sure you could set it up to contacts only without paying. Now it's "contacts and premium users"; so basically "you can get spam from unknown contacts unless you pay us for the feature".

I guess they'll start locking more features soon. 150PLN/~35€ per year isn't something I'd pay for an messenger app.

As for alternatives, I'm looking back at Signal which was installed by few friends of mine already but they were rather experimenting with it than becoming active users. There's Session, SimpleX which both look quite interesting, and of course there's Matrix but none interested anyone from my circles and I doubt it would do. They're singing "I won't install another app on my phone" and "Messenger is enough for me, why I would install that" tunes.

> so basically "you can get spam from unknown contacts unless you pay us for the feature".

This did not cross my mind until you wrote it, but I would not be surprised the slightest if it went like this. AI spambots + direct access to people's message apps is not a future I'm looking forward to. The moment that happens and Telegram gives me a hint that with paid subscription I can avoid the spam, I am out of there.

> They're singing "I won't install another app on my on my phone"

I used to have an old as hell smart phone with limited memory, so I sympathise with this somewhat. Still, changing apps is a small price to pay if things start looking bad with Telegram.

The Durov's may be benevolent owners, but Telegram also has a bunch of VC firms as owners. They are shareholders with seats on the board who want a payout, even if they don't IPO.

That's true. With VC funding there's usually some grace period for users before the milking begins, usually in the form of an IPO.

It depends on how much of the income comes from the users.

Remember that 100% of the profit for the shareholders comes from the income, so the profit depends on keeping the payers happy.

I suppose so if the paid subscriptions turn out to be popular enough. Otherwise the revenue will have to come from advertisements and other user unfriendly sources.

If archive.is is blocked:

https://cc.bingj.com/cache.aspx?d=3250518537142&w=zCpkkmVASo...

Non-paywall link : https://archive.is/2024.03.11-120810/https://www.ft.com/cont...

how does telegram make money?

- Telegram Premium subscriptions (5 million users as of January 2024 [1])

- Ads (non-targeted/non-user-profiling) in Telegram channels

- now there’s some store/merchant features being added

[1]: https://t.me/rove/244

According to the article, it apparently comes from advertising and subscriptions:

> Pavel Durov told the Financial Times that Dubai-based Telegram had grown to become one of the world’s most popular social media apps while making “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenues after introducing advertising and premium subscription services two years ago.

i've never seen one ad.

There are entire ad networks built around in-post advertisements that appear in Telegram channels. They look and feel highly "native", you might not even notice that they are ads.

I read they only showed ads in a few countries as a test and now plan to expand. They also said they'll share the money from ads with channel owners, since ads are only shown in public channels. No idea which countries will be included, though, wonder if the EU will get them.

They have a nice Premium subscription.

What makes it nice?

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