Durov's Channel
t.me
As Telegram approaches 500 million active users, many of you are asking the question – who is going to pay to support this growth? After all, more users mean more expenses for traffic and servers. A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going. For most of Telegram’s history, I paid for the expenses of the company from my personal savings. However, with its current growth Telegram is on track to reach billions of users and to require appropriate funding. When a tech project reaches this scale, typically there are two options – start earning money to cover the costs, or sell the company. Hence the question – which path will Telegram take? I’d like to make a few points to clarify our plan: 1. We are not going to sell the company like the founders of Whatsapp. The world needs Telegram to stay independent as a place where users are respected and high-quality service is ensured. Telegram must continue to serve the world as an example of a tech company that strives for…
  • k_o_tOP
    5·
    4 years ago

    the motive is understandable, but it kinda looks like the beginning of the end :/

    • riccardoM
      3·
      4 years ago

      how can they be trusted not to read the messages to run targeted advertisement?

      They can’t. Anyway, we’ll see how they will implement advertisements in channels. Hopefully they come up with a better ads model, not based directly on the user interests. Since a Telegram channel usually revolves around a single theme or topic, ads could be targeted based on channels affinity, without having to tailor them to the user interests. In the post, Durov talks about ads in relation to how they are currently ran by third-parties (or by the community, in the form of channel owners’ informal agreement of mutual advertising). The future ads platform might be shaped on this logic and operate in a similar way, without having to rely on analytics on the users interests to exploit their attention. Durov has a pretty decent vision on consumerism and users exploitation for revenue, hopefully they will do it in a decent way. But this is just speculation. We will see how this thing will roll. This might as well mark the end of Telegram as an user-friendly, quite ethical alternative to corporate-owned messaging platform