Telegram Needs to Generate Revenue Next Year & is Launching Pay-for Services

How often do you still mention this string of letters in your everyday life?

SMS.

While not totally unused (because Singtel, Starhub, M1 and Mindef still need to SMS you), when you think of messages, you think of apps like Whatsapp and Telegram.

Not to mention, all the cute stickers each one has.

And yes, Goody Feed is also on Telegram, too. You can find us over here.

However, these apps are free, and a common question on people’s minds is, “How do they make money?”

Well, Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov has a plan.

Telegram Needs to Generate Revenue Next Year & is Launching Pay-for Services

In a statement on 23 Dec, the 36-year-old founder of the app said that it would launch pay-for services.

In his lengthy statement, Durov mentioned that all this time, he has funded a large majority of the app’s expenses.

There are almost 500 million users on the app, and he says that it needs to find ways to keep it sustainable.

And while it’s not as much as WhatsApp’s over 1.6 billion users, it’s still a pretty sizeable user base.

“A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going.”

Generating Revenue

In order to do that, Durov said that the company needs to start “generating revenue”.

However, he makes it clear that he will not be selling the company to a third party.

“We will add some new features for business teams or power users.”

The founder says that these features will be premium content that you have pay to gain access too.

Reader: Eh, then the rest of the app how?

Thankfully, what regular, free features that we have now will still remain free.

Or in Durov’s words, “free, forever”.

He notes that due to the massive user base, these new features can be added in smoothly and without any disruption.

Wants Users To Benefit From Monetisation

In the final section, Durov says that the community should benefit from Telegram’s monetisation too.

He gives the following example: “If we monetize large public one-to-many channels via the Ad Platform, the owners of these channels will receive free traffic in proportion to their size.”

Which is honestly great, just so long as we don’t have to deal with another SG Nasi Lemak group again.

Another example was should the app introduce premium stickers, he wants the makers of the stickers to receive part of the profit too.

Hopefully, this venture into paid services will do well, considering that they took a venture into cryptocurrency previously which didn’t end so well.

And if you want to know more about the founder, Pavel Durov, you can check out this article written about him.

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Featured Image: Allmy / Shutterstock.com