Yuri Litvinenko’s column on the difference between the interests of advertisers and the audience of social networks

In the last year and a half, the popularity of Telegram as a content platform has grown, including due to the blocking of platforms that are familiar to advertisers and owners of monetized channels. The service, which for years has been expanding functionality specifically with the expectation of mass users, is reorienting itself to professional ones, which may cause dissatisfaction with the former.

Although the founder of Telegram, Pavel Durov, promised in 2021 not to use personal data of users when displaying ads, after the last update of the ad cabinet, Telegram Ads works just like that. Advertisers, according to the profile website “Durov’s Code”, will be able to target ads by user interests, countries and cities, as well as use third-party audience databases – for example, purchased from brokers. It follows from Telegram’s privacy policy that the changes will allow directing ads to Russian-speaking users, but not displaying them in the country.

Telegram, having updated its privacy policy last Saturday, did not advertise the changes as actively as the stories presented at the end of June. Their representatives of influence marketing, by the way, are waiting no less: 24-hour vertical posts are considered a universal format for promotion through bloggers, it is being implemented by a variety of platforms – from purely business LinkedIn to streaming Twitch.

It is advertisers who are considered clients of any social network, so it is logical that Telegram goes to meet them halfway. However, the site’s relationship with advertisers is also affected by the behavior of its users who publish content for their own pleasure. The weakening of moderation on Twitter after Elon Musk’s purchase of the platform has led to an increase in negative content, and this, in turn, has led to the decision of large advertisers such as Volkswagen and Carlsberg to suspend advertising campaigns. This turned out to play into the hands of Meta (the company’s Facebook and Instagram activities have been declared extremist and banned in Russia): by the launch of the new Threads network last week, almost all major brands were already present.

Telegram, being a platform that until recently did not even have its own advertising network, is just entering the active phase of commercialization. If it happens to the detriment of the user experience, we will be able to observe similar processes, but only from the audience of the site. Something similar can be noted on the same Twitter: some of the users, dissatisfied with the policies of Elon Musk, even before the advent of Threads, began to switch to third-party sites like Mastodon. One way or another, but there is a gap between brands and their audience, and after all, the former are present in social networks precisely for the sake of the latter.