Durov admits that most of the time he paid the company’s bills out of personal savings. But at the current rate of growth of Telegram, this will soon become impossible. According to the head of the company, in this case, there are only two ways – to start making money to cover costs, or to sell the company to a larger player.
“Starting next year, Telegram will begin to monetize,” wrote Pavel Durov.
Important points:
All current Telegram services will remain free. But there will be new features, including paid functionality for business teams and “advanced users”.
For ordinary users, Telegram will always remain free, of course, because the company needs a resource base on which paid customers will work out their budgets.
All Telegram messaging services will remain ad-free. “We believe that advertising in personal and group chats is unacceptable,” wrote Durov. “Communication between people should not be interrupted by advertising.”
Important changes are coming for the owners of telegram channels, who are already accustomed to making money on advertising, receiving it from customers. Now Telegram will offer its own advertising platform for channels, which “will provide users with comfort and safety, and companies will cover their traffic costs”
Meanwhile, Telegram is approaching the mark of 500,000,000 active users, and more and more often the question arises of who will pay for it. Supporting projects of this size costs hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Sources:
It was expected because Telegram is becoming more demanding as a content creating tool and business instrument. And by adding paid business functions Telegram is just prolonging its independent and ad-free policy. For me, there is nothing to be afraid of. For an ordinary user the situation is unlikely to change and this whole situation is really reasonable.
I guess, it mostly because of expanding of server storage. A lot of people use it as a cloud disk for saving their information there(I do the same), thus it is really expensive to maintain it without commercialization of Telegram.
Advertising in the app automatically indicates surveillance of the user. R.I.P Telegram.
Telegram had too many useful functions (like sending very large files through it) not to be monetized. At least they are not doing it like Facebook, which has very irritating advertisements.