In less than six months, Telegram premium's subscriber base has grown to over 1 million users since the app first began its funding efforts.
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Pavel Durov announced the update on his Telegram channel on Tuesday, calling the milestone “one of the most successful examples of a subscription social networking program ever.”
In the same update, he shared that Telegram premium still “represents only a fraction of Telegram’s total revenue.” Even so, he remains optimistic that Premium will eventually bring in as much money as ads.
The app, which is used by over 700 million users each month, launched its Telegram Premium version in late June. Subscribers get a number of benefits, including the ability to send files up to 4GB and faster downloads. In the United States and the United Kingdom, a monthly subscription costs around $6.00, while in emerging markets like India, it costs just around $2.20.
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Durov said late last month that the Dubai- plans, beyond Telegram premium, to expand its funding efforts by developing a range of decentralized tools, including non-custodial wallets and exchanges.
“As we successfully leverage our app, Telegram will be able to pay for the servers, traffic, and employee salaries necessary to continue building new features and supporting existing ones. Instead of seeing our users as a means to make more money, we see revenue as a way to provide them with more value,” he wrote on Tuesday about Telegram premium.
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Telegram is a cross-platform, cloud with a focus on security and speed. It is available in more than 20 languages. Users can share photos and videos and create groups or channels to broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers.
