Messaging application Telegram is approaching the 500 million user mark and plans to generate revenue starting next year to keep the business afloat, its founder Pavel Durov said.
Durov said he has personally bankrolled the seven-year-old business so far, but as the startup scales he is looking for ways to monetise the instant messaging service. All existing features will remain free, said Durov.
The service, which topped 400 million active users in April of this year, will introduce its own ad platform for public one-to-many channels. Another way Telegram could monetise its service is through premium stickers with additional expressive features.Some analysts were hoping that Telegram would be able to monetise the platform through its blockchain token project. But after several delays and regulatory troubles, Telegram said in May that it had decided to abandon the project.
For this project, Telegram had raised USD 1.7 billion from investors in 2018. It had planned to distribute its token, called grams, after developing the blockchain software. Telegram offered to return USD 1.2 billion to investors earlier this year.
Telegram has also introduced a new group voice chats feature to the application. The new voice chats feature, which is similar to Discord’s always-on room, supports a few thousand participants.
