When One App Rules Them All: The Case of Telegram and Mobile in Iran

I wrote this post to shed light upon some allegations in a post by Qurium which are mostly based on some hypothetical assumptions. In the so-called post, there are many claims against my company, AdVenture, and I will address them here.

1- How Telegram became the Super-App for Iranians?

Due to low penetration of Internet and lack of critical mass from one side, and ever-increasing censorship and blockage of social media sites/apps in Iran, there were no social media in the country with considerable amount of users before 2014. Cloob, Facenama and Jomlak were some of unsuccessful Iranian social networks, all of them lost the competition to Telegram and Instagram altogether.

In 2014, both mobile network operators of Iran started rolling out their 3G/LTE data plans and for the first time many Iranians experienced internet on their mobile phones. As the country was learning more about Internet and mobile apps, Telegram came and since Viber was throttled by government, people started joining Telegram. Everybody was inviting their friends and families to this messenger and users was quite satisfied with free and easy-to-use communication tools of Telegram. Actually, many users experienced Internet through Telegram for the first time in their life, and Iran is a Telegram-first nation rather than even mobile-first!

By introducing channels, Telegram became like web browser and channels like websites! Soon after introduction, channels became popular and now they are main source of all sorts of content: News, Music, Jokes and Memes, Entertainment, Movies and Series, Facts and Fun Facts and the list goes on.

2- Telegram-first nation gives birth to Telegram-first businesses!

Telegram was and still is the only platform with a critical mass of Iranian users and some members of the community started new schemes for monetizing this huge user base. These new entrepreneurs, which I call them Telegrampreneurs, are quite different with typical startup founders: They are mostly teenagers and young adults of 14 to 24 years old, almost no prior professional experience, and many of them from small cities!

These Telegrampreneurs are channel owners, bot owners, subscriber acquisition experts and channel administrators and have unparalleled insight on how Telegram works and what’s the dynamics of communities on Telegram!

When we started thinking about possibility of developing an ad network based on Telegram channels, these Telegrampreneurs were among the sources of insight for us; they already had monetized their audience with ads and we asked for their consultation. We came across many interesting people and their helpful comments and contribution helped us understand this all-new attention marketplace.

3- AdVenture and Telegrampreneurs!

In process of developing our telegram-based ad-network, as I mentioned above, we had a few Telegrampreneurs as our consultants. One of them was Mr.APD who is mentioned in Qurium post. He is a young and highly talented tech/business developer who helped us as a consultant for about four months.

When Hooshmand first published a post with claims of malware distribution from AdVenture-owned servers, I got back to him on twitter and I understood that the malware has nothing to do with AdVenture and is associated with APD’s servers. Same day, I reached to our CTO, Saeed Hajizadeh, to check all our servers for any connection between AdVenture and those mentioned malwares. We found out that that beta version of our website, www.ad-venture.ml, was uploaded to one of Mr.APD’s servers and our tech team disconnected the website in the same day and migrated it to our own servers.

I also asked our tech team and our CTO, to enforce new security measures into place and cut off access of all R&D and development teams from the main servers and gave them new servers for their operations. Any code push and any server access is restricted and only our CTO can push something to our servers. We also separated our R&D team and all their operations in the same week and rented a new office for them.

As I wrote in an email to Mr.Norman from Qurium team, Mr.APD has never had any legal ties to AdVenture nor was he an employee of it.

We took every security measure to keep our servers safe and close any backdoor for potential misuses but we are only responsible and accountable for our own business and our employees and cannot account for any suspicious activity of third-parties who have collaborated with AdVenture some point in past(or future).

I am open to answer all the inquiries on this issue and anyone can get back to me on email or Telegram:

alireza.aghasi@gmail.com

t.me/anachron