Telegram, the encrypted messaging application and former drug dealer paradise, is planning to monetize in 2021, said founder Pavel Durov on Wednesday.
O announcement happens when the app approaches its eighth birthday and “approaches 500 million active users”, according to the statement that Durov made in his Telegram Channel. Each new user who comes flooding, he explained, brings more server costs for the company deal with. “A project our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars a year to continue,” he said.
All parts of the platform currently free will remain free, he said, adding that in the new year, Telegram will add some new resources for business teams or “advanced users”. He did not go into the details of these new features that would be, in addition to mentioning that Telegram would bring its own ad platform on board. (In a separate post Telegram announced that it would build a persistent voice chat function similar to the Clubhouse– although, again, this may or may not be one of the aspects being monetized.)
According to the post, the idea is not to run ads in private or group chats specifically, since, in Durov’s words, “communication between people must be free from any type of advertising”. Instead, he pointed to what he called Telegram’s “one-to-many” channels, which have their own dedicated group following a specific Telegram poster. They act more like a Twitter feed than an SMS conversation and, like Twitter, will receive ad serving treatment.
So far, the platform has been widely floated in Durov’s personal savings. In 2018, he pulled $ 1.7 billion dollars of private investors in the hope to develop their own blockchain token that would potentially generate revenue from the platform. But after two years and a significant amount of SEC resistance, Durov announced in May that he would end the effort and reimbursing a good $ 1.2 billion back to the investors behind it.
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As for the appearance of these potential ads, it remains unclear. Twitter ad systems, like we noticed in the past, they had their own problems and, as Durov’s post correctly points out, having an ad exchanged for its normal scrolling kind of shit, especially when they replace regular posts the way that Twitter ads tend to do. Then again, any ad on any social media platform is usually an undesirable experience at best, even when not horrible Look at. Furthermore, considering how creepy in-app ad platforms tend to be, can you imagine why this would not be the most welcome news for Telegram users most concerned with privacy.
Durov, for his part, promised that Telegram’s imminent ad serving systems would be “easy to use” and respect Telegrammers. privacy. But, considering how we heard this exact promise of only on each player in the tracking and aiming game, it might be worth taking Durov’s word with a grain of salt.