Pavel Durov, founder of the Telegram messaging service, has announced that some paid features will be introduced soon. In a statement published on his Telegram channel, Durov said that now that the service has reached 500 million active users, it would take “a few hundred million dollars” to continue to grow and cover costs. Durov says that in order to keep Telegram independent he will not sell the company like WhatsApp, the other popular messaging system that was bought by Facebook in 2014, and which will therefore have to start producing revenues, starting next year.
To do this, new paid functions will be introduced for companies or for “power users” (presumably users who have very popular channels), while all other existing functions will remain free for users. Furthermore, Telegram will introduce its own platform to manage advertising, to place advertisements in public channels. Durov also specifies that these changes will be introduced in a way that “will barely be noticed by users”.
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