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Thoughts from the CEO of Telegram
Telegram's mission is to preserve privacy and freedom of speech around the world.
In cases where local laws go against this mission or impose technologically unfeasible requirements, we sometimes have to leave such markets. In the past, countries like China, Iran and Russia have banned Telegram due to our principled stance on the matter of human rights. Such events, while unfortunate, are still preferable to the betrayal of our users and the beliefs we were founded on.
In Brazil, a court requested data that is technologically impossible for us to obtain. We are appealing the decision and are looking forward to the final resolution. No matter the cost, we will stand up for our users in Brazil and their right to private communication.
🏆 In the last 5 years, Telegram surpassed Facebook Messenger to become the most popular cloud-based messaging app. Telegram is now second only to WhatsApp and is closing the gap year by year. No wonder our competitors are concerned! 🔥
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It has been a year since Telegram started its monetization, but the results have already exceeded our expectations.
Unlike other apps, we took a privacy-conscious approach to ads: we decided that no personal data should be used for targeting and that promoted messages should only be shown in public one-to-many channels. Despite that, our ads have significantly outperformed the market and put Telegram on a steady path towards financial sustainability.
Telegram Premium, which we introduced just 5 months ago, quickly surpassed 1 million subscribers and has become one of the most successful examples of a social media subscription plan ever launched. While it still represents just a fraction of Telegram’s overall revenue, Telegram Premium is growing steadily every day, and one day may even rival our ads.
The future looks exciting. The additional monetization strategies I discussed in my previous posts are already bearing fruit, and the features we are working on now will set the foundation for further financial growth for Telegram in 2023.
Thanks to successful monetization, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic and wages necessary to keep building new features and supporting existing ones. While some other apps consider their users a tool to maximize revenue, we consider revenue a tool to maximize value for our users.
I feel particularly excited about today’s Telegram update. It adds topics to large groups, transforming these linear chats into slick mobile-friendly versions of good old Internet Forums.
Ironically, the very first popular internet service I built around 20 years ago was also an Internet Forum – a message board for students of my university, which eventually grew into the biggest student portal in the region.
16 years ago I again incorporated forums into the Communities section of VK, a social network I founded. Since VK was the most popular communication platform in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and other countries, tens of millions of people used the forum feature there.
I feel nostalgic about those times: I had yet to learn the skill of hiring engineers and designers back then, so I programmed and designed everything on my own, working 20 hours per day.
Today I am fortunate to have the best coding team in the world to recreate the forum experience for hundreds of millions across all platforms in a more modern, fast and accessible form. Telegram will now support organized conversations where thousands of people can concurrently discuss different subjects in the same group.
Topics today come packed with lots of features – including the ability to close and pin topics, flexible notification options and lots of fun animated emoji to be used as topic icons. But this is just the start. Taking advantage of the two-week delay caused by Apple’s review, we have begun to expand these new threaded groups into something even more powerful.
Some content creators started using third-party payment bots to sell access to individual posts in their Telegram channels. This way, content creators could receive close to 100% of whatever their subscribers paid, which was great.
Unfortunately, we received word from Apple that they were not happy with content creators monetizing their efforts without paying a 30% tax to Apple. Since Apple has complete control over its ecosystem, we had no alternative but to disable such paid posts on iOS devices.
This is just another example of how a trillion-dollar monopoly abuses its market dominance at the expense of millions of users who are trying to monetize their own content. I hope that the regulators in the EU, India and elsewhere start taking action before Apple destroys more dreams and crushes more entrepreneurs with a tax that is higher than any government-levied VAT.
In the meantime, we at Telegram shall work to offer creators powerful and easy-to-use tools to monetize their content – outside of Apple's restrictive ecosystem.
Happy April Fool's day! 🤡
Be careful with this day though! Exactly a year ago my assistant jokingly suggested that since I became a French citizen, I should add a blank space in my last name and become a “Du Rov”. Laughing out loud, we filled out a form to “frenchify” my name, which after a few additional touches became “Paul du Rove”.
While we soon forgot about that form, the application actually got approved and the passport reissued 🙈
Thinking about that day, I’m grateful that my assistant’s creativity didn’t extend to my Emirati passport. Otherwise you would be reading this post in “Al Dur’s Channel”.
2022 has been a successful year for Telegram. Telegram reached 700 million active users and solidified its position as one of the top 5 most downloaded mobile apps in the world.
This year was also the first year of monetization for Telegram. The results exceeded our expectations and have allowed us to lay the financial foundation for future growth.
In 2022, we shipped dozens of new features, which changed how messaging apps work and how billions communicate. We shall relentlessly continue on that trajectory in 2023.
At Telegram, we are lucky to be able to do what we love. I wish everyone the ability to follow their passion in the New Year 💫
The blockchain industry was built on the promise of decentralization, but ended up being concentrated in the hands of a few who began to abuse their power. As a result, a lot of people lost their money when FTX, one of the largest exchanges, went bankrupt.
The solution is clear: blockchain-based projects should go back to their roots – decentralization. Cryptocurrency users should switch to trustless transactions and self-hosted wallets that don't rely on any single third party.
We, developers, should steer the blockchain industry away from centralization by building fast and easy-to-use decentralized applications for the masses. Such projects are finally feasible today.
It took only 5 weeks and 5 people including myself to put together Fragment – a fully decentralized auction platform. We were able to do this because Fragment is based on The Open Network, or TON – a blockchain platform that is fast and efficient enough to host popular applications (unlike Ethereum, which unfortunately remains outdated and expensive even after its recent tweaks).
Fragment has been an amazing success, with 50 million USD worth of usernames sold there in less than a month. This week, Fragment will expand beyond usernames.
Telegram's next step is to build a set of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and decentralized exchanges for millions of people to securely trade and store cryptocurrencies. This way we can fix the wrongs caused by the excessive centralization, which let down hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users.
The time when the inefficiencies of legacy platforms justified centralization should be long gone. With technologies like TON reaching their potential, the blockchain industry should be finally able to deliver on its core mission – giving the power back to the people.
👨💻 We prepared some Halloween surprises for you, but it seems someone doesn’t want us to celebrate. Telegram's latest update has been stuck in Apple Review for more than a week, and we have not been informed about the current reason for the delay ⛔️
Apple claims they review apps within 24 hours, but, in our experience, it takes at least 7-10 days for any meaningful product update to reach the App Store. My friends who run smaller apps tell me it's even worse for them, as they have to wait more than a month just to ship bug fixes to their Apple users 😵💫
However, positive change is coming. Tomorrow, a new set of laws called the Digital Markets Act will come into force in the European Union. This regulation should put an end to the abuse of market power by gatekeepers like Apple and Google.
We, the developers, should start relying on the DMA to defend ourselves and our users. If you are an app developer who faces issues with the App Store or Google Play, let me know about it at pavel@telegram.org from your company e-mail address with the word "DMA" in the title. It will be up to Apple to decide if they want to spend their resources on improving their processes — or on fines.
Happy Halloween! 🥳
Time to fight some demons 😈