empireOfLove2Enshittification Continues: Discord to begin showing advertisements on it's free platform
MNByChoiceIn 2022, Discord had a revenue of $445 million. Maybe if they were a private company that would be enough.
Discord Revenue and Usage Statistics (2024)
When Discord launched in 2015, it pitted itself against two deep-seated apps: Skype and TeamSpeak. Neither were excellent, which is one of the reasons Discord generated so much traffic and praise from the get-go. Inevitably, this led to several server crashes, as the company struggled to meet demand. Jason Citron, the founder of Discord, had come off a $100 million acquisition of his previous social gaming technology, called OpenFeint. He knew that by taking a modern approach to communication online, Discord could far surpass what Skype and TeamSpeak offered. Citron made Discord more than a text / audio chat service through the use of servers. Instead of searching on Reddit or forums, players could join a server specifically dedicated to a game. As servers ballooned
Dark ArcI haven’t given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.
The entire premise of Discord’s free service was to gobble up the market from TeamSpeak, Ventrillo, and Mumble and capture the ecosystem using a ton of venture capital. In any sane world it would be an illegal mode of operation to provide “free service” based on venture capital like that.
TeamSpeak did manage to react but their reaction has been slow (I think they’re a much smaller team and still a private company). Their new client is fairly feature complete but still not out of beta (AFAIK).
Mumble is an open source project and is still ticking as a result as well (though obviously it’s received much less love since Discord stole the spotlight).
kinklesI haven’t given Discord a dime from the start because I knew this was going to happen.
Glad you feel validated after… 7 years