Telegram launches sponsored messages – the best online advertising solution? – Wired PR Lifestyle Story

Note: The following opinion article expresses the personal opinions of the author.

Telegram Creator, Pavel Durov, officially he announced on his channel which the company mentioned last Friday in recent weeks – Sponsored Posts, which will allow you to pay for ads on an independent social network.

But before another app that gets an annoying interruption from people you don’t know or like expresses your disappointment, you might want to read on and see, for the first time, whether they might be quite useful.

“Win-win” vs. “lose-lose” advertising

Telegram, like any other business, is not a charity. Somehow it has to make money and advertising is often one of the ways to achieve this, especially with millions of users.

After the US Securities and Exchange Commission thwarted its attempt to issue the ‘Gram’ cryptocurrency, there was hardly any alternative left.

But it should also be noted that advertising is not always bad; it’s a way to get your message across to new people that would otherwise be difficult or impossible to reach. If companies didn’t advertise, they wouldn’t be able to sell a lot, and so they wouldn’t be able to offer a lot of work to the people who work for them.

That’s why, as a tool, ads are neither good nor bad. It’s important what we do with them.

The most extreme example in the field of social media, of course, is Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg will not allow others to take content to your personal timeline, but will interrupt you while you watch videos and allow his “pixels” to follow your behavior on millions of websites outside of Facebook.

The company collects a lot of data about what you do, like, read, write, who you interact with, what you browse online stores, what you read for news, and where you physically go with your mobile device.

It will then cut this data, analyze it, and give it to a growing group of advertisers who can use all of Facebook’s knowledge about you to provide ads that try to keep you away from what you’ve been busy with. – usually sell your money at the end of the process (often in a very misleading way).

Google – built in advertising – isn’t much better, even if it at least offers an advertising solution that shows sponsored results for the topics you’re looking for. This way, it really helps both you and the advertisers.

This is the kind of service I would describe as a “win-win”: providing advertising to people who want it, at the right time, without disrupting the rest of their activities.

Most advertising, however, is very uninterrupted and therefore very annoying. TV commercials, radio commercials, brochures, spam from unsolicited mailboxes, and, on the Internet, flashing banners, fake buttons, and finally clips that appear in the middle of an interesting video or between songs, ruining the atmosphere of the moment.

This, on the other hand, is a “lost-and-lost” way of supplying ads: hoping for unexpected clicks, or often fooling people into clicking on something they were never really interested in.

Some advertisers (especially those who are dishonest) may find short-term luck with this type of promotion, but in the long run, they are truly self-defeating.

Disturbing people at an inappropriate time may not lead you to buy anything, but it may create negative links with your brand as intrusive or frustrating.

That said, aside from search ads, which expand the options available to you, in any case in response to everything you’re already looking for, there’s no other channel that is as useful for publishers as it is for users.

Telegram may change that.

In terms of advertising, less is more

With the launch of Protected Messages, the company has made it pretty clear that things that some may consider disabled.

It does not collect personal data or track your behavior outside of the app. Publishers can only link to their Telegram channels or bots, not external websites, so all interactions must take place within the app.

In addition, promoted messages will only appear on channels with more than 1,000 subscribers, and ONLY after the user has read all recently unread messages.

But what seems like a rotten deal to advertisers is a blessing in disguise.

Because you can target users by topic or channel, it’s much easier to decide what to spend your money on.

Because Facebook, for example, has so many options, it also makes it difficult for advertisers to know what’s going on. The success of your campaigns largely depends on the algorithms for finding out who your best customer might be, but this can take a relatively large expense over a long period of time, so enough data can be collected to achieve this (and there is no guarantee). will never do).

While Google’s solutions aren’t suitable for all advertising (especially content), Twitter is limited and restrictive, like native ad networks like Outbrain (they’ll gladly give people a tabloid-level garbage, but there are plenty of products and topics). no-no).

Telegram, on the other hand, is more open and simple. Even if you fail, you fail quickly and you can try faster.

And because you can target specific channels, it also means you can do your own research, rather than relying on an opaque code while you’re charging for the day, hoping to hit the gold someday.

Second, the requirement to direct people to your channels creates a need to create a Telegram presence. It’s harder to fool users if you can’t take them offline to your phishing or otherwise misleading website.

It’s a win-win for those with a real audience and interesting content, and a win-win for users if spammers try to use bad Telegram abuse. Telegram itself also makes it easier to moderate ads and quickly remove offensive ones and their perpetrators.

Finally, since protected messages appear only when users have read all the messages waiting on the channel, they are not interrupted when they are reading or discussing anything with other people.

Ads become add-ons, an extension of the experience, probably related to their interests and the topic of a particular channel, that they supply when they have nothing more to consume, which makes them more likely to participate in the message. they were interrupted.

It’s a win-win for advertisers, increasing the effectiveness of advertising, and a win-win for app users, who may also receive useful suggestions for following channels that may be of interest.

In addition, it’s hard to overstate the importance of an independent, non-American advertising channel that is tightening the screw on what Big Tech Bay Area supports in its networks.

Telegram certainly makes a greater commitment to free speech, and legitimate advertisers should find it considerably easier to promote their content, services, or products on the platform than Facebook, Google, or others.

With Silicon Valley giants, your success depends on ever-changing guidelines as well as the whims of your personal activities, because writing unfamiliar things can keep your personal account off the Facebook ad, even if your business has nothing to do with your personal life.

That’s why I welcome Telegram’s new features, both as an advertiser and as a regular user. The app can go from being a messenger to a real social network.