SAN FRANCISCO — Telegram is now delivering 12 billion messages a day through its chat service, according to its founder Pavel Durov. This is a 2 billion increase from August and also comes as he took a shot against the market leader WhatsApp where Durov says it “sucks.”
At the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Durov derided the Facebook-owned chat service saying that it’s walled garden doesn’t let users keep their messages across whatever device they’re using: “If you have WhatsApp and your phone goes down, you don’t have access to your messages. You can’t send documents and it’s not private. I’m not sure if I’m a big fan of WhatsApp three years ago, and not so sure now.”
WhatsApp has over 900 million monthly active users so it’s certainly the industry’s top dog, but Durov isn’t caught up on the whole “releasing numbers” issue. It last reported in May that it has 62 million MAUs.
Durov also disclosed that one of the things that could be coming soon is the notion of a payments API, which would certainly help the messaging service put it on par with the likes of Facebook Messenger. He said that Telegram probably won’t build the payments product itself but would instead partner with third-party providers.
On the issue of privacy, which seems to be a major selling point for Telegram, Durov was asked about if there’s exceptions to the rule. Specifically, he acknowledged that ISIS is using the service, so does that keep him up at night knowing that terrorists use it? “That’s a good question,” he started off saying. “Privacy is ultimately more important than our fear of bad things happening, like terrorism. If you look at ISIS, yes, there’s a war going on in the Middle East. Ultimately, ISIS will find a way to communicate with its cells, and if any means doesn’t feel secure to them, they’ll [find something else]. We shouldn’t feel guilty about it. We’re still doing the right thing, protecting our users’ privacy.”
A two-year old company, Telegram hasn’t taken any money from outside investors. The company appears to be bootstrapped through money derived from Durov’s shares in Russia’s social network Vkontakte, which he sold. He declined to tell how much money he’s garnered from that sale, although it’s reported that his stake was worth $300 million.
Would he ever take outside investment for Telegram? Doubtful, as Durov says that the company likes being independent and has enough money to go on for a while.
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Telegram delivers 12B messages a day, CEO Pavel Durov says WhatsApp sucks
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