Not sure about others but I have successfully been able move many people over to signal from WhatsApp and fb messenger. And many friends have done the same too.
WhatsApp is still pretty big in India though.
WhatsApp is huge in many countries. You and I may have the tech skill and privacy concerns to move to something like signal but 99% of users either don't care or aren't aware of the difference.
Adopting signal was exactly as technologically challenging as adopting WhatsApp for me. The desktop client is harder since it's not a web service, but no one I know that isn't 'tech savvy' uses the web client for Whatsapp either.
Their new focus on businesses integration is causing a lot of spam to end users from unsolicited business messages. There is no way to escape it.
Bought that something from someone a few years back and gave your phone number to them? Thanks. Now their hot deals messages reside right next to the messages from your family and friends.
I'm expecting good amount of market share loss once a good alternative is found that focuses purely on personal or group messaging and not on business spam.
At a price of over $0.13 per message in some regions it seems more cost effective to just automate the app yourself / use a third party binding then their business API.
I wonder what happens if people en masse started doing it, and they block a large share. Forcing talks about open standards, or pushing people to Telegram / Signal. No, I'm no fan of Telegram, but the plethora of bot options make it extremely interesting for all kinds of usecases. Much more interesting than WhatsApp currently is. Hopefully Signal would embrace such tooling, too.
Moreover it is quite disappointing to see that Africa is one of the most expensive region even though the purchasing power of the population is much lower than the rest of the world.
Not sure how to build competitive services for that region based on that pricing.
This is what happened to Dutch startup Watermelon in 2016. They were providing Whatsapp bindings for around 800 - mostly Dutch - companies that were using Whatsapp for customer support. TL;DR Whatsapp blocked and sued them even while there was no alternative available back then.
I think as one of the prime funnels of information and barometer of public opininon, this is what they calculated to be the optimum fee per seperate country. Surely there are plenty of parameters going into this price calculation, but I think the basis is the country GDP, competitors in the space, provided value, amount of SME's with dispensable income, and some others.
Surely they could make it even higher given the already widespread adoption of WhatsApp, but that might poke the bear and initiate anti-trust'ish. So, I think this is exactly the sweet spot to break everyone's balls, but just not enough.
I only know one person on WhatsApp without a contract (which all have hundreds of free texts), and the Pay As You Go options I see in the UK go as low as a penny per text.
Most phone plans in the U.S. include unlimited SMS/MMS messages, including prepaid MVNO plans that are very affordable (with entry-level plans under $20/month). Pay-as-you-go plans are an exception, but they are becoming less cost-effective as monthly plans become more competitive.
I think the consumer mindset changes as soon as something is advertised as "unlimited", because you no longer have to think about conserving resources.
Not necessarily. In France SMSes are free for any plan costing more than 2€/month ( which you get as a backup or a kid), but still most people communicate via WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger. Even the disaster that is the last one has better UX than SMSes.
WhatsApp is a de facto standard method of communication in many countries ( e.g. in the Netherlands everything happens over WhatsApp). So if they abuse their position in typical Meta fashion, fines will rain and hopefully a breakup will happen.
Someone at board level in there has made some nefarious decision around pricing to screw some particular business segment, while in parallel polishing some "truth-speak" around making the world wonderful with this pricing model.
I trust them less than most politicians, including some of those obviously nutjob politicians.
No one who had spent a single minute on Android's Facebook app or Messenger would put a single thought into using Facebook technologies for their front end. The fact that it's a popular choice is truly a mystery to me.
Facebook has ~3 billion users, you think not a single one of them uses React for web development because of FB's android apps? That sounds absurd, even for hyperbole. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make.
Telegram's popularity depends on a vibrant ecosystem of third-party clients and bots that run on their API, and they wouldn't want to risk losing that. On the other hand, WhatsApp has prohibited third-party clients since 2015 and restricts their API to businesses that they are now charging these new rates.
Telegram is the more consumer-friendly choice, partly because they have not entrenched their market position in the same way that WhatsApp has.
At the end of the day, how else will chat apps make money? Fundamentally, as long as it's one central service run by one company they'll have to make money by eventually milking their users once they have the marketshare. Whatsapp said they'd do it forever and now they are.
The CEO and co-founder of Telegram made a statement on monetization last year:* https://t.me/durov/142
These parts highlight the strategy:
> 4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.
> 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
> 6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.
If you accept the co-founder's statement, Telegram is only going to monetize one-to-many communications, and not charge fees for one-to-one conversations (in contrast to WhatsApp). Telegram is privately held, not publicly traded, and has no obligation to prioritize profit maximization over their mission.
Look, I use telegram ever since whatsapp went down this road and I'm generally supportive of them. I will just say private vs public is better as long as the guy (it's almost always a guy) is a "good guy" and not a "bad guy." Relying on One Person is not always a safe bet because One Person can die or want to move on and then we're back to the coin flip as to whether it's "good guy" or "bad guy."
Generally, my preference is an open protocol because protocols can't be controlled by one person and they can't (eventually) be bought. For now, I support Telegram but the future has to be protocols for the sake of free and open communication. Of course, the downside is no one makes money off of that, or at least they don't as much just selling a server running a protocol everyone else can run. Or even worse for them, they can't exert as much control.
I agree 100%. I hope that Matrix will eventually succeed both WhatsApp and Telegram, since it is decentralized and fully free and open source on both the client and server sides.
> [Twitter's] popularity depends on a vibrant ecosystem of third-party clients and bots that run on their API, and they wouldn't want to risk losing that.
The reality is that nobody is paying a subscription to use a chat app. So they have to monetize the same way as always: ads and company bots. And that's at odds with the third-party ecosystem where they'll just block the ads and the company bots. This is just the same thing as always. It just hasn't been ruined yet.
If they do people will just move to matrix. A lot of groups I'm in are already bridged to matrix so the move will be simple and chat history will be preserved.
Nowhere on the page could I find a definition of conversion. What is a conversion? How does Facebook know about it? What about me do they share with other advertisers? How is my conversion used to target future ads?
This is just the regular Facebook ad pricing playbook being pushed out to all "meta" properties. Instead of ad placements though, it's for bot messages.
For Business-Initiated Rates, Rest of Africa is higher than North America, Rest of Latin America, Rest of Central & Eastern Europe, Rest of Asia Pacific and Rest of Middle East (basically any region other than Western Europe). Any specific reason for this? "Being poor is expensive" kinda thing?
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[ 4.4 ms ] story [ 326 ms ] threadBought that something from someone a few years back and gave your phone number to them? Thanks. Now their hot deals messages reside right next to the messages from your family and friends.
I'm expecting good amount of market share loss once a good alternative is found that focuses purely on personal or group messaging and not on business spam.
> All conversations are measured in 24-hour increments, or "sessions", that start whenever the first message from a business is delivered.
Not sure how to build competitive services for that region based on that pricing.
https://www.tellerreport.com/tech/2019-08-08---chatbot-maker...
I think the consumer mindset changes as soon as something is advertised as "unlimited", because you no longer have to think about conserving resources.
I trust them less than most politicians, including some of those obviously nutjob politicians.
This walled garden needs to die or I am hoping for some law changes requiring all messenger apps to open up their protocols. It is my data.
Telegram is the more consumer-friendly choice, partly because they have not entrenched their market position in the same way that WhatsApp has.
At the end of the day, how else will chat apps make money? Fundamentally, as long as it's one central service run by one company they'll have to make money by eventually milking their users once they have the marketshare. Whatsapp said they'd do it forever and now they are.
These parts highlight the strategy:
> 4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever.
> 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort.
> 6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic.
If you accept the co-founder's statement, Telegram is only going to monetize one-to-many communications, and not charge fees for one-to-one conversations (in contrast to WhatsApp). Telegram is privately held, not publicly traded, and has no obligation to prioritize profit maximization over their mission.
* The statement is linked from their FAQ: https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...
Generally, my preference is an open protocol because protocols can't be controlled by one person and they can't (eventually) be bought. For now, I support Telegram but the future has to be protocols for the sake of free and open communication. Of course, the downside is no one makes money off of that, or at least they don't as much just selling a server running a protocol everyone else can run. Or even worse for them, they can't exert as much control.
The reality is that nobody is paying a subscription to use a chat app. So they have to monetize the same way as always: ads and company bots. And that's at odds with the third-party ecosystem where they'll just block the ads and the company bots. This is just the same thing as always. It just hasn't been ruined yet.
Also list time I ran it synapse was a monster to operate requiring lots and lots of resources.
There's currently 2 billion WhatsApp users, it's about four times as large as Telegram.
Next they should work on app/widget model inside of the WhatsApp. That should cover 90% of use-cases for adhoc communication with companies.
This is just the regular Facebook ad pricing playbook being pushed out to all "meta" properties. Instead of ad placements though, it's for bot messages.
The definition seems to be at the start of the page - it’s every “chat session” with a bot
I don’t see the link with advertising or targeting?
What kind of price discrimination it is?
Neither taxes or GDP can explain this well.