Telegram Monetization: Messaging App to Earn Revenue with 500M Users

The Telegram messaging application is nearing a milestone of 500 million users and intends to begin generating income starting next year to ensure the continuation of its operations, according to founder Pavel Durov’s statement on Wednesday.

Durov explained that he has personally funded the business for the past seven years; however, as the service expands, he is exploring methods to monetize the instant messaging platform. He stated that a project of this magnitude requires a minimum of several hundred million dollars annually to maintain functionality.

Having surpassed 400 million active users in April, the service will implement its own advertising platform specifically for public, one-to-many channels – a platform designed to be user-friendly, protect user privacy, and cover the expenses related to servers and data transmission, Durov detailed on his Telegram channel.

“By monetizing large public one-to-many channels through the Ad Platform, the administrators of these channels will receive complimentary traffic proportional to their audience size,” he explained. Furthermore, Telegram is considering premium stickers featuring “enhanced expressive capabilities,” with the artists creating these new stickers also receiving a share of the profits. The goal is to support millions of Telegram creators and small businesses, ultimately improving the experience for all users.

Certain analysts had anticipated that Telegram would monetize its platform through its blockchain token initiative. However, following multiple postponements and facing regulatory challenges, Telegram announced in May its decision to discontinue the project.

Telegram, based in Dubai, had secured $1.7 billion in funding from investors in 2018 for this project. The original plan involved distributing its token, known as grams, after the blockchain software was fully developed. Earlier this year, Telegram offered to reimburse $1.2 billion to its investors.

“Telegram possesses a social networking aspect. Our extensive public one-to-many channels can each accumulate millions of subscribers and function similarly to Twitter feeds. In numerous markets, channel owners currently display advertisements to generate revenue, sometimes utilizing external ad platforms. These advertisements often appear as standard messages and can be disruptive. We aim to address this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels,” Durov wrote today.

Durov affirmed that all current features will remain available at no cost, and, as a prominent critic of Facebook’s WhatsApp, he emphasized Telegram’s commitment to avoiding advertisements in private one-on-one or group conversations, deeming such a practice undesirable.

“We will not be selling the company, unlike the founders of WhatsApp. The world requires Telegram to remain independent, a platform where users are valued and a superior service is guaranteed,” he wrote. “Telegram will commence revenue generation starting next year. We will proceed in alignment with our principles and the commitments we’ve made over the last seven years. Due to our current scale, we can achieve this without being overly intrusive. The majority of users will likely observe minimal changes.”

On Wednesday, Telegram also unveiled a new feature: group Voice Chats. This new functionality, comparable to Discord’s persistent room concept, can accommodate several thousand participants.