Telegram’s founder Pavel Durov is thinking about ways to monetize Telegram, which until now he mostly paid from his own savings:

As Telegram approaches 500 million active users, many of you are asking the question – who is going to pay to support this growth? After all, more users mean more expenses for traffic and servers. A project of our size needs at least a few hundred million dollars per year to keep going.

For most of Telegram’s history, I paid for the expenses of the company from my personal savings.

His ideas are to add new paid or business features and introduce a privacy-respecting advertising platform for Telegram channels.

Personally, based on past posts by Durov, I believe he is someone who sticks pretty strongly to his principles and also for personal reasons (he left Russia after getting into trouble) will ensure that Telegram continues to remain privacy-friendly and secure.

Telegram has been portrayed as a “Nazi messenger” in the media lately, especially in Germany, because Covidiots and right-wing extremists also use the platform. But Telegram is built in such a way that you don’t really notice anything about it unless you specifically search for such channels and groups.

I’m curious how the monetization attempts will look like practically and if they will work better than the attempt to introduce a crypto-currency.

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