Hacker News Reader

- Telegram Premium subscriptions (5 million users as of January 2024 [1])

- Ads (non-targeted/non-user-profiling) in Telegram channels

- now there’s some store/merchant features being added

According to the article, it apparently comes from advertising and subscriptions:

> Pavel Durov told the Financial Times that Dubai-based Telegram had grown to become one of the world’s most popular social media apps while making “hundreds of millions of dollars” in revenues after introducing advertising and premium subscription services two years ago.

i've never seen one ad.

There are entire ad networks built around in-post advertisements that appear in Telegram channels. They look and feel highly "native", you might not even notice that they are ads.

I read they only showed ads in a few countries as a test and now plan to expand. They also said they'll share the money from ads with channel owners, since ads are only shown in public channels. No idea which countries will be included, though, wonder if the EU will get them.

They have a nice Premium subscription.

What makes it nice?