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Do they really need advertisers? I'm not sure why all these companies think the whatsapp route isn't possible. People are happy to pay a small yearly subscrip

by tw04 6y ago

Do they really need advertisers? I'm not sure why all these companies think the whatsapp route isn't possible. People are happy to pay a small yearly subscription for apps if they're truly doing something useful. While I don't personally use telegram, I'd argue it falls into the category of "useful enough to pay for".

ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
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.
- davidweatherall 6y ago
  Are you happy with services that have ads, but give the option to remove them for a subscription fee?
  - GrinningFool 6y ago
    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'.
    - davidweatherall 6y ago
      Cool! Thanks for the reply - so you'd feel much more comfortable with a subscription to opt out of all tracking and ads?
      - GrinningFool 6y ago
        Yeah, if I could reasonably verify that the tracking was not occurring. Unfortunately in today's environment, trust is also an issue.
  - fernandotakai 6y ago
    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.
    - fakedang 6y ago
      Don't most you tubers and Spotify channels have patreons?
      - fernandotakai 6y ago
        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.
        skinnymuch 6y ago
        You’re essentially not helping the YouTube creators from the numbers they’ve given on their payout from Premium. It is incredibly small.
        fernandotakai 6y ago
        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.
        skinnymuch 6y ago
        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.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    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.
  - ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
    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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- fullstop 6y ago
  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.
- ComodoHacker 6y ago
  >I absolutely despise ads of any kind Can the business that pays your bills survive without ads?
- helsinkiandrew 6y ago
  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.
- WilTimSon 6y ago
  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.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- maneesh 6y ago
  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.
  - xNeil 6y ago
    Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.
    - dzonga 6y ago
      it's from their quarterly financial reports. rough estimate. for developing markets they generate about 2$ per user. and in developed markets like $7 per user.
    - ign0ramus 6y ago
      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/2021/Facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2020-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
      - slymon99 6y ago
        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-20-average-revenue-per-user-q4-big-jump/ https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/facebook-made-almost-2...
      - xNeil 6y ago
        Found the original article, I hope this helps :) https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-hate-ads/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-h...
- elastolin 6y ago
  > 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.
cyrksoft 6y ago
I use Telegram a lot and would gladly pay for it. However, that route is not so easy. People in Latin American countries can't really afford to pay for apps. If they have to choose between a free WhatsApp (who everybody uses) and a fee (which can be high in real terms for poorer countries) they will choose WhatsApp. 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)
- zpeti 6y ago
  This is basically why Facebook doesn't offer a free option either, they make hardly anything from third world countries per user, but prob $50+ per year from USA users. 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.
- thatguy0900 6y ago
  How much money does whatsapp actually get from people in those countries? I was under the impression that ad revenue from third world users was very low. How much would it be to charge them the same amount they would get from ads?
- ignoramous 6y ago
  > However, that route is not so easy. People in Latin American countries can't really afford to pay for apps. AdGuard and Cloudflare (at least for Warp+) adjust their monthly and annual subscription rates based on location. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
  - iso8859-1 6y ago
    This incentivizes inequality. I live in Mexico, earning 10x more than most, yet I could pay less.
    - rchaud 6y ago
tubularhells 6y ago
Not everyone wants to sell user data. Their business is in private communication. WhatsApp reads through all your shit, whether you like it or not.
- sfifs 6y ago
  Nope. WhatsApp can only potentially read your group messages since 1:1 messages are end to end encrypted. You shouldn't spread FUD
  - tubularhells 6y ago
    This was in the news some months ago, they have backdoors for 1:1s that they use to comply with government agency and police data requests. Do go look it up.
    - EMM_386 6y ago
      This is untrue. https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/ https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/
    - Aachen 6y ago
      This has not been found, that would be major news on mainstream channels. (Do go and cite sources.) 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.
  - tpush 6y ago
    Group messages are also end-to-end encrypted.
  - alfongj 6y ago
    WhatsApp group chats are end to end encrypted too. You must be thinking of... Telegram, where only secret 1:1 chats are end to end encrypted
thatguyagain 6y ago
I guess one threat in that scenario is if some other competing service actually does succeed in their ads driven model, they can attract a lot more users, because it's free? But I have no idea about running a company this size tbh, just thinking out loud.
fabiospampinato 6y ago
"some" people are happy to do that. Some people just don't want to pay for software regardless of anything else. 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.
- A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  This is part of the issue. Audience. Mass consumer does not know and/or does not care. If that is the case, the company can easily determine that Zoidberg approach of 'Why not both' is very rational, if annoying to people like me.
  - Hani1337 6y ago
    We live in a world where you can find almost any computer service for free. Not everyone is like lazy americans willing to take the credit card out at any road bump. They will find a service that does the same for free. I can barely convince my friends with that mindset to come to Telegram when they already majorly use Messenger. Not only do they need an incentive to switch to Telegram, adding a fee to use the platform would simply kill the app. There are many ways to monetize services that don't require users to pay just to join, and this is the way forward even though it's meeting resistance from companies, it will win in the long run. Don't fight it, work with it and learn to take advantage of it instead.
mromanuk 6y ago
> “A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going” 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.
- notahacker 6y ago
  That envelope maths might explain why they're pinning their hopes on VC FOMO cash injections to explore more speculative revenue generation models. 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.
  - mromanuk 6y ago
    100% agree
szszrk 6y ago
A paid telegram would be crippled from large part userbase. I would not be able to convince anyone from friends and family to use it if it were paid - they can't see the value before installing. Without them I would not pay for it as well.
- chii 6y ago
  it's quite "easy" to solve that problem - you as the person who wants to convince others to use, would pay up front for the app for them. 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.
- tw04 6y ago
  I don't see that as being a hurdle. You make the first year free which, IIRC, is what whatsapp did.
  - hobofan 6y ago
    It would make it a hurdle for the young userbase. When I started using Whatsapp I was ~16, and didn't have access to a credit card or any other way to pay for a yearly subscription (and I'm not sure if my parents would have okayed it).
  - skinnymuch 6y ago
    WhatsApp made every year free for 90%+ of Android users. Maybe 95%+. It is hard to find people who paid for Android Whatsapp. Even more so paying more than once. So that doesn’t work to make money.
- Aloha 6y ago
  Or you have value-add services available by subscription
user-the-name 6y ago
How much do you think they could charge, and what percentage of their users do you think would pay that?
ComodoHacker 6y ago
Pavel clearly has a social agenda behind Telegram. He wants to provide access to independent uncensored communication platform to everyone for free. So looks like ads is the only other option left for now.
- qwerty456127 6y ago
  Today ads never come without tracking. This is the problem. And even without tracking ads are a kind of garbage I don't want anyway. So, the day I get ads in Telegram I'm leaving. At the same time I wouldn't mind a reasonable (~1$/month, I don't do anything heavy, text messaging only) subscription.
  - jamesrr39 6y ago
    I'm not sure about this, if anything there seems to have been a few services recently (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Qwant) that are supported by ads (presumably with metrics on ad performance for advertisers) but without following you around the internet. They seem to be doing ok as businesses, and it seems a reasonable compromise to me. 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.
  - elastolin 6y ago
    > ~1$/month, I don't do anything heavy, text messaging only 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.
    - qwerty456127 6y ago
      > 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.
Waterluvian 6y ago
These startup social apps that run on a loss are heavily, intensely focused on user count as a KPI. 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!)
- ZephyrBlu 6y ago
  > 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.
Huwyt_Nashi031 6y ago
While I would be happy to pay for it in principle, the value of Telegram to me is that is has provided a platform for many political dissidents - individuals and groups - who might otherwise be persecuted for their beliefs and activism, and denied a platform for learning and discussion. 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?
- tw04 6y ago
  I'm not sure why that would be a problem. Telegram could easily make bitcoin and/or cash a payment option like countless VPN providers have. No "real info" necessary.
  - postmodernbrute 6y ago
    Bitcoin and other crypto coins are very inaccessible. Even disregarding transaction fees, you can't really get bitcoin without giving your payment details to someone. 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.
corobo 6y ago
Especially when there's Telegram groups that are charging $10/mo to get into haha. Advertising and privacy don't mix. e: I was wrong, it's $20/mo (wip.co)
- fsflover 6y ago
  > Advertising and privacy don't mix. 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.
  - corobo 6y ago
    How do they track views, clicks and payouts?
    - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
      You don't, ideally. 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.
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  Isn’t wip.co telegram a secondary feature? The payment is for the community at large. Namely the website, no?
  - corobo 6y ago
    Fuck knows, I only remember it starting as a telegram group.
curryst 6y ago
I would imagine that it's, in part, because they want to allow anonymous communication for political dissidents and the like. It's hard to make an app that is resistant to nation state level spying. It's that much harder to implement an anonymous payment system on top of that. I know Bitcoin and the like exist, but you're vastly increasing the attack surface to identify someone.
batiudrami 6y ago
The #1 thing holding people back from changing to Telegram or Signal is network effects and you want to add a paywall? 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.
rozab 6y ago
Although I suspect Discord is still some way from profitability, it's monetisation strategy seems to be working well (charge subscription for premium membership with small features like custom emojis, animated profile pics, better audio quality). A surprising amount of people go for it. Telegram has many nerdy hobby communities which could buy the cosmetics or whatever and subsidise the service for the normal users.
- moritonal 6y ago
  A thing that a lot of people pay for is the better video screen sharing quality. People are happy to have "just about okay" for free, and "good" for a subscription fee.
  - IntelMiner 6y ago
    +1 to this. I give Discord something like 5 bucks a month for 1080p video streaming at 60 FPS 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
WanderPanda 6y ago
Charging for everyone will hamper network effects, chraging for poweruser features should still be fine. The should charge for the things that are actually costing them the money, like long term storage of big files
hardtke 6y ago
The Whatsapp route is to get purchased by and subsidized by Facebook. There is no chance the antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will allow something like that to happen again.
freewilly1040 6y ago
It's unclear what you mean by the WhatsApp route. Their route was getting bought and subsidized by Facebook, and eventually, show ads.
ZephyrBlu 6y ago
I don't think subscriptions work for every product. In the case of something ubiquitous like a messaging app, I think ads scale better than subscriptions.

by tw04 6y ago

ObsoleteNerd 6y ago

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.

davidweatherall 6y ago
Are you happy with services that have ads, but give the option to remove them for a subscription fee?
- GrinningFool 6y ago
  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'.
  - davidweatherall 6y ago
    Cool! Thanks for the reply - so you'd feel much more comfortable with a subscription to opt out of all tracking and ads?
    - GrinningFool 6y ago
      Yeah, if I could reasonably verify that the tracking was not occurring. Unfortunately in today's environment, trust is also an issue.
- fernandotakai 6y ago
  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.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Don't most you tubers and Spotify channels have patreons?
    - fernandotakai 6y ago
      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.
      - skinnymuch 6y ago
        You’re essentially not helping the YouTube creators from the numbers they’ve given on their payout from Premium. It is incredibly small.
        fernandotakai 6y ago
        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.
        skinnymuch 6y ago
        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.
- bombcar 6y ago
  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.
- ObsoleteNerd 6y ago
  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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
fullstop 6y ago
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.
ComodoHacker 6y ago
>I absolutely despise ads of any kind Can the business that pays your bills survive without ads?
helsinkiandrew 6y ago
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.
WilTimSon 6y ago
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.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
maneesh 6y ago
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.
- xNeil 6y ago
  Some did the math - the price Facebook would need to charge every user would be $11 a month. Sorry I can't remember WHERE I read it though.
  - dzonga 6y ago
    it's from their quarterly financial reports. rough estimate. for developing markets they generate about 2$ per user. and in developed markets like $7 per user.
  - ign0ramus 6y ago
    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/2021/Facebook-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2020-Results/default.aspx https://investor.fb.com/investor-news/press-release-details/...
    - slymon99 6y ago
      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-20-average-revenue-per-user-q4-big-jump/ https://www.adexchanger.com/platforms/facebook-made-almost-2...
    - xNeil 6y ago
      Found the original article, I hope this helps :) https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-hate-ads/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/15/would-it-make-us-love-or-h...
elastolin 6y ago
> 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.

cyrksoft 6y ago

I use Telegram a lot and would gladly pay for it. However, that route is not so easy. People in Latin American countries can't really afford to pay for apps. If they have to choose between a free WhatsApp (who everybody uses) and a fee (which can be high in real terms for poorer countries) they will choose WhatsApp. 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)

zpeti 6y ago
This is basically why Facebook doesn't offer a free option either, they make hardly anything from third world countries per user, but prob $50+ per year from USA users. 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.
thatguy0900 6y ago
How much money does whatsapp actually get from people in those countries? I was under the impression that ad revenue from third world users was very low. How much would it be to charge them the same amount they would get from ads?
ignoramous 6y ago
> However, that route is not so easy. People in Latin American countries can't really afford to pay for apps. AdGuard and Cloudflare (at least for Warp+) adjust their monthly and annual subscription rates based on location. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
- iso8859-1 6y ago
  This incentivizes inequality. I live in Mexico, earning 10x more than most, yet I could pay less.
  - rchaud 6y ago

tubularhells 6y ago

Not everyone wants to sell user data. Their business is in private communication. WhatsApp reads through all your shit, whether you like it or not.

sfifs 6y ago
Nope. WhatsApp can only potentially read your group messages since 1:1 messages are end to end encrypted. You shouldn't spread FUD
- tubularhells 6y ago
  This was in the news some months ago, they have backdoors for 1:1s that they use to comply with government agency and police data requests. Do go look it up.
  - EMM_386 6y ago
    This is untrue. https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/ https://signal.org/blog/there-is-no-whatsapp-backdoor/
  - Aachen 6y ago
    This has not been found, that would be major news on mainstream channels. (Do go and cite sources.) 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.
- tpush 6y ago
  Group messages are also end-to-end encrypted.
- alfongj 6y ago
  WhatsApp group chats are end to end encrypted too. You must be thinking of... Telegram, where only secret 1:1 chats are end to end encrypted

thatguyagain 6y ago

I guess one threat in that scenario is if some other competing service actually does succeed in their ads driven model, they can attract a lot more users, because it's free? But I have no idea about running a company this size tbh, just thinking out loud.

fabiospampinato 6y ago

"some" people are happy to do that. Some people just don't want to pay for software regardless of anything else. 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.

A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
This is part of the issue. Audience. Mass consumer does not know and/or does not care. If that is the case, the company can easily determine that Zoidberg approach of 'Why not both' is very rational, if annoying to people like me.
- Hani1337 6y ago
  We live in a world where you can find almost any computer service for free. Not everyone is like lazy americans willing to take the credit card out at any road bump. They will find a service that does the same for free. I can barely convince my friends with that mindset to come to Telegram when they already majorly use Messenger. Not only do they need an incentive to switch to Telegram, adding a fee to use the platform would simply kill the app. There are many ways to monetize services that don't require users to pay just to join, and this is the way forward even though it's meeting resistance from companies, it will win in the long run. Don't fight it, work with it and learn to take advantage of it instead.

mromanuk 6y ago

> “A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going” 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.

notahacker 6y ago
That envelope maths might explain why they're pinning their hopes on VC FOMO cash injections to explore more speculative revenue generation models. 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.
- mromanuk 6y ago
  100% agree

szszrk 6y ago

A paid telegram would be crippled from large part userbase. I would not be able to convince anyone from friends and family to use it if it were paid - they can't see the value before installing. Without them I would not pay for it as well.

chii 6y ago
it's quite "easy" to solve that problem - you as the person who wants to convince others to use, would pay up front for the app for them. 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.
tw04 6y ago
I don't see that as being a hurdle. You make the first year free which, IIRC, is what whatsapp did.
- hobofan 6y ago
  It would make it a hurdle for the young userbase. When I started using Whatsapp I was ~16, and didn't have access to a credit card or any other way to pay for a yearly subscription (and I'm not sure if my parents would have okayed it).
- skinnymuch 6y ago
  WhatsApp made every year free for 90%+ of Android users. Maybe 95%+. It is hard to find people who paid for Android Whatsapp. Even more so paying more than once. So that doesn’t work to make money.
Aloha 6y ago
Or you have value-add services available by subscription

user-the-name 6y ago

How much do you think they could charge, and what percentage of their users do you think would pay that?

ComodoHacker 6y ago

Pavel clearly has a social agenda behind Telegram. He wants to provide access to independent uncensored communication platform to everyone for free. So looks like ads is the only other option left for now.

qwerty456127 6y ago
Today ads never come without tracking. This is the problem. And even without tracking ads are a kind of garbage I don't want anyway. So, the day I get ads in Telegram I'm leaving. At the same time I wouldn't mind a reasonable (~1$/month, I don't do anything heavy, text messaging only) subscription.
- jamesrr39 6y ago
  I'm not sure about this, if anything there seems to have been a few services recently (e.g. DuckDuckGo, Qwant) that are supported by ads (presumably with metrics on ad performance for advertisers) but without following you around the internet. They seem to be doing ok as businesses, and it seems a reasonable compromise to me. I'm curious about how Telegram will decide what ads to show, how heavily it will try and personalize them; will the ads be relevant to the channel you are in or follow you around Telegram. FWIW, personally, I like the idea of a choice of ads or paid subscription best.
- elastolin 6y ago
  > ~1$/month, I don't do anything heavy, text messaging only 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.
  - qwerty456127 6y ago
    > 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.

Waterluvian 6y ago

These startup social apps that run on a loss are heavily, intensely focused on user count as a KPI. 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!)

ZephyrBlu 6y ago
> 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.

Huwyt_Nashi031 6y ago

While I would be happy to pay for it in principle, the value of Telegram to me is that is has provided a platform for many political dissidents - individuals and groups - who might otherwise be persecuted for their beliefs and activism, and denied a platform for learning and discussion. 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?

tw04 6y ago
I'm not sure why that would be a problem. Telegram could easily make bitcoin and/or cash a payment option like countless VPN providers have. No "real info" necessary.
- postmodernbrute 6y ago
  Bitcoin and other crypto coins are very inaccessible. Even disregarding transaction fees, you can't really get bitcoin without giving your payment details to someone. 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.

corobo 6y ago

Especially when there's Telegram groups that are charging $10/mo to get into haha. Advertising and privacy don't mix. e: I was wrong, it's $20/mo (wip.co)

fsflover 6y ago
> Advertising and privacy don't mix. 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.
- corobo 6y ago
  How do they track views, clicks and payouts?
  - chipotle_coyote 6y ago
    You don't, ideally. 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.
skinnymuch 6y ago
Isn’t wip.co telegram a secondary feature? The payment is for the community at large. Namely the website, no?
- corobo 6y ago
  Fuck knows, I only remember it starting as a telegram group.

curryst 6y ago

I would imagine that it's, in part, because they want to allow anonymous communication for political dissidents and the like. It's hard to make an app that is resistant to nation state level spying. It's that much harder to implement an anonymous payment system on top of that. I know Bitcoin and the like exist, but you're vastly increasing the attack surface to identify someone.

batiudrami 6y ago

The #1 thing holding people back from changing to Telegram or Signal is network effects and you want to add a paywall? 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.

rozab 6y ago

Although I suspect Discord is still some way from profitability, it's monetisation strategy seems to be working well (charge subscription for premium membership with small features like custom emojis, animated profile pics, better audio quality). A surprising amount of people go for it. Telegram has many nerdy hobby communities which could buy the cosmetics or whatever and subsidise the service for the normal users.

moritonal 6y ago
A thing that a lot of people pay for is the better video screen sharing quality. People are happy to have "just about okay" for free, and "good" for a subscription fee.
- IntelMiner 6y ago
  +1 to this. I give Discord something like 5 bucks a month for 1080p video streaming at 60 FPS 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

WanderPanda 6y ago

Charging for everyone will hamper network effects, chraging for poweruser features should still be fine. The should charge for the things that are actually costing them the money, like long term storage of big files

hardtke 6y ago

The Whatsapp route is to get purchased by and subsidized by Facebook. There is no chance the antitrust authorities in the US and Europe will allow something like that to happen again.

freewilly1040 6y ago

It's unclear what you mean by the WhatsApp route. Their route was getting bought and subsidized by Facebook, and eventually, show ads.

ZephyrBlu 6y ago

I don't think subscriptions work for every product. In the case of something ubiquitous like a messaging app, I think ads scale better than subscriptions.