Telegram App Is Booming but Needs Advertisers -- and $700 Million Soon (wsj.com) 30
Telegram is riding high, adding tens of million of users this year. Now the bill is coming due. WSJ: The messaging service and social-media platform owes creditors roughly $700 million by the end of April, according to people briefed on the company's plans and loan documents viewed by The Wall Street Journal. At the same time, Telegram Group must cover rising equipment and bandwidth expenses because of its rapid growth, despite going years without attempting to generate revenue. Telegram is one of the few significant social-media challengers to Facebook on a trajectory toward one billion users active each month by the end of 2022, up from roughly 550 million today. But first Pavel Durov, the Dubai-based Russian emigre who owns Telegram, needs to figure out how to convert his app's momentum into a self-sustaining business. [...] To pay the bills, Mr. Durov is issuing investors $1 billion to $1.5 billion of company debt, with the promise of discounted equity if the company eventually goes public, the people briefed on the plans said. He has also announced plans to start selling ads in public Telegram channels as soon as later this year, as well as offering other premium services for businesses and users.
Oddly enough (Score:2)
It'll take a significant amount of VC investment to make it work, the secret sauce in many recent tech company success stories.
Operating for years without generating a profit has worked out quite well for several current behemoths.
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He is no fool and he has a good team - his creations are the only ones still standing and surviving against Facebook.
Whatever he comes up with will not generate 700M in a month though - he will have to refinance and do it a few more times until he breaks cash positive.
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Internet advertising is taking two major body blows. Firstly revenue generated by it, even when targeted, is not worth the advertising spend, in fact individually targeted is doing even worse, content targeted seems to be hanging in there, aligning the and with the content and not with the user.
Secondly and even more damaging over the long term, advertising driven climate change is a reality. They would not spend money on ads if it did not achieve wasteful consumption, purchases based up marketing triggered
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He has also announced plans to start selling ads in public Telegram channels as soon as later this year, as well as offering other premium services for businesses and users.
Well, that'll solve the too-many-users problem quite handily.
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the guy "gets it" how to make good IMs (Score:2)
he basically took the best things we learned from mIRC era and turned them into a more or less modern-day version, falling just a bit short of becoming a social network. (discovery on Telegram is still pretty abysmal, which is more of a problem to him than he probably thinks.)
unfortunately, brilliant as he is with project vision, he's nowhere like that as far as product is concerned. TON was a bit of a cop-out; it was like - okay I'll make some good software and tack this overhyped stuff on its side and it
Telegram is not secure (Score:1)
That's what happens when you borrow money from the mob, and from the Russians? Oh lordy! They make the Italians look like Chico Marx. There is no way that anybody under that kind of budget can maintain any kind of privacy, impossible
Their cryptocurrency GRAM (Score:1)
Here is a thought (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm all for charging for the service. I'd pay...$10/year for Telegram. At most.
The problem is that they will end up charging $6.95/month for it, and it's not worth that much to anybody. Not really.
It's almost certainly dead. Nobody will use it if it has ads, and nobody will pay for it if it's not really cheap. But they can't make it cheap, because the investors want HUGE returns.
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Whatapp had half a billion people paying $1/€1/£1/etc per year - US$500 million each year - which was plenty to run their infrastructure before the owners sold out to Facebook. it was running fine until the founders sold out to get "a boatload of money" (Brian Acton).
Facebook doesn't understand anything other than putting their users under total surveillance and selling their information to advertisers, and they think they could get more money than Whatsapp can get from subscriptions, so that's w
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Because there are too many fragmented services...
Most people end up with several messaging apps installed because some of their friends use telegram while others use whatsapp or wechat etc. I must have 10+ different incompatible messaging apps installed, some of which are used to occasionally communicate with just a handful of people. I'm not going to be paying for all of them, and some people wouldn't want to (or cant) pay at all so any service that starts charging would end up dying out as large numbers o
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If only we had an open, interoperable chat protocol!
https://delta.chat/en/ chat encryption over email (Score:3)
Delta Chat is like Telegram or Whatsapp but without the tracking or central control. Delta Chat does not need your phone number.
https://delta.chat/en/ [delta.chat]
Delta Chat is Open Source and Free Software. You can use, see, change, and share it at will, with everyone.
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The social media circle of life (Score:1)
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The problem is in step 1. There is no good platform. Telegram is a decent messaging program. But no, it's gotta be a *platform*. Everything to everybody.
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*Needs* advertizers? (Score:2)
Advertising isn't the only option. If the infrastructure costs are too high, you could:
It will be bought (Score:2)
By FB, Apple, Amazon or MS.
Easy.
Next issue?
Re: It will be bought (Score:2)
700m ? (Score:2)
Signal (Score:2)
Use semaphore (Score:2)
Monty Python solved this issue long ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]