Telegram, nearing 500 million users, to begin monetizing the app – TechCrunch
Instant messaging app Telegram is “approaching” 500 million users and plans to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat, its founder Pavel Durov said on Wednesday. Durov said he has personally bankrolled the seven-year-old business so far, but as the startup scale…
techcrunch.com
2020 is the year I went from one active chat in Telegram to many dozens. It's become by far my favorite chat app. I recently convinced most of my friends to move our group chats over from Google Hangouts, and they love it, too. Not surprised it has 500M active users.
The most interesting part of this news to me is the voice chat.
I tried it out over the weekend. It's basically your own private Clubhouse room, but inside of a Telegram group where there's also text chat going on. This means you can have people talking and chatting at the same time, or perhaps people on the "stage" talking via voice while people in the "audience" chat via text. (In Clubhouse the people in the audience have no way to communicate.)
This makes Telegram a surprisingly ideal place to… host calls for a podcast?
Hear me out.
Telegram is now the only app that's (a) already widely used, (b) can host high-quality voice calls, (c) supports a persistent, private community of people who can listen in on the call and (d) have a high-quality chat-based conversation while the call continues.
So you could do the following as a podcaster:
Bonus: All of your previous podcast guests would be inside your community, so you'd have a pretty badass group.
You could arguably do this on YouTube or Twitch, but this has the added benefit of being a native phone app that sends push notifications. And I'd guess your Telegram-based community would be much more active, because Telegram is persistent chat, whereas YouTube and Twitch chat cease to exist when you're not streaming.
Zoom is out of the question, because the chat UI sucks, it lacks moderation tools, it also isn't persistent, and it doesn't send notifications when you go live. And Clubhouse doesn't allow chat, isn't widely available, and (I think) only supports public rooms.
I might do this for Indie Hackers…
That would be sweet.
This happened earlier than expected
https://wordcounter.tools
It's also ethical (at least to date), unlike the 'competitor' apps by F.
Also it's great opportunity to advertise cheaply on the new market