Telegram: premium features and (some) advertisement from 2021 onward
Telegram is a popular messenger that is available for free for many platforms. The entire platform is ad-free and there is no Pro version available that users can upgrade to.
Starting in 2021, Telegram will introduce premium features and advertisement on its platform. The introduction of revenue generating features is often of concern to existing users of a platform. Telegram promises that the changes will be introduced in a user-friendly manner.
In short: all current features will remain free, and all-parts of the program devoted to messaging will remain ad-free.
Telegram founder Pawel Durow explained in a post on the platform why the changes are required and why these options have been selected. Telegram has grown significantly in the eight years of its existence. Expenses have been paid by Durow for the most part but traffic and server demand has increased so that a stable revenue source needed to be found for the platform. Since selling the platform or selling out users was out of the question, something needed to be done on the platform itself to generate revenue.
The idea was born to introduce premium features for business users and power users. These will be introduced as optional components and will be paid for by the businesses or users that would like to use them. Durow does not provide information on these features in the post but business focused features such as better scheduling or reporting could be potential options.
Revenue will also be generated through advertisement on the platform, and Telegram plans to introduce its own ad platform for public one-to-many channels. Durow promises that the platform will be user friendly and respect privacy.
Large public one-to-many channels will get something in return according to the post. Durow mentions free traffic to these channels, but also other revenue opportunities such as making available premium stickers on the platform and sharing revenue with the artists who created them.
Closing Words
It remains to be seen how these changes are introduced in 2021 and beyond. They do look good on first glance on paper, especially that individual chats remain free of advertisement and that all existing features remain free as well.
Now You: Do you use Telegram?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.