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Thoughts from the CEO of Telegram
🔮 As I predicted, 2024 turned out to be a very good year for Telegram. For the first time in its 3-year history of monetization, Telegram became profitable 🏆
📈 This year, the number of Telegram Premium subscribers tripled, exceeding 12 million. Our ad revenue also increased a few times. As a result, Telegram's total revenue in 2024 surpassed $1 billion, and we are closing the year with more than $500 million in cash reserves, not including crypto assets 🪙
🏦 Over the past four years, Telegram has issued about $2 billion in debt. We repaid a meaningful share of it this Fall, taking advantage of favorable prices for the Telegram bonds. But there’s a lot of work ahead 👨💻
↗️ Our innovations in monetization this year (⭐️ Stars, 🎁 Gifts, 🪙 Giveaways, 🖥 Mini Apps, 🤝 the Affiliate Platform, 💼 Telegram Business, and 📥 Telegram Gateway…) demonstrate that social media platforms can achieve financial sustainability while staying independent and respecting users' rights.
🎯 The purpose of monetization is to ensure that you, our users, will always remain our #️⃣1️⃣ priority 🫂
🤝 The Affiliate Platform we launched this month is an instant hit. Its goal is to let users and channels earn Stars by inviting people to mini apps. In just 12 days, 15,000 affiliate programs were created, and 4 million users got referred to mini apps 📈
😇 The Affiliate Platform gives channels and mini apps what they need most: channel owners earn revenue, while mini app developers gain new users. Unlike similar systems, Telegram's Affiliate Platform is transparent and guarantees instant commissions each time a referred user makes a transaction in a mini app🪙
😺 Above all, it’s simple. Anyone can start or join an affiliate program on Telegram. You can view existing affiliate programs in “My Stars” in Settings (choose “Earn Stars”). Or just check out what it looks like in the video below 🍿
⭐️ The @Major mini app is one of my favorite success stories in the Telegram ecosystem. Launched by @Roxman, a 27-year-old entrepreneur, Major earned over $10 million in revenue and gained 70 million users in just 5 months 📈
⭐️ I like Major because it’s quick to adopt the new possibilities of the mini app platform and adds features that feel like they naturally belong in Telegram. And I like @Roxman, who I’ve followed since before he launched @Fabrika and @Major 🤝
🫴 Roxman generously donated 1% of $MAJOR tokens to me, which I won’t be selling for the next 10 years. I hear the Major team has many innovations in the pipeline (like username NFT rentals and digital IDs). And tomorrow is a big day for them — their $MAJOR token is getting listed on six big exchanges 📆
⭐️ Let’s wish them good luck! 💫
💰 Ten days ago, a developer launched a mini app that has already generated $500,000 in revenue. He built it in just two days during the time off from his main job.
🖌 Without a team or marketing budget, he single-handedly implemented everything — design, concept, client-side code, and server-side code. Inspired by my own solo journey when I created VK in 2006, he tackled every element himself.
📈 Thanks to its brilliant concept and minimalist design, his mini app went viral. For the past ten days, it’s ranked in the Top 4 grossing mini apps on Telegram. This is the power of hard work, determination, and the Telegram mini app platform! #️⃣
👀 Big day today — Telegram has taken its first step toward becoming a video platform 📺
🤬 Until now, videos in channels were displayed in exactly the same format they were uploaded, often requiring users to wait and download gigabytes just to watch a short clip ☹️
▶️ With today’s update, however, Telegram servers will compress popular videos into multiple quality options and optimize them for streaming. Now, when you watch a video, Telegram automatically selects the most suitable quality based on your connection speed ⚙️
👏 As a result, watching videos on Telegram is now a far smoother experience! Our October update includes more features that redefine messaging — but I’ll let you fully focus on (spooky) videos this Halloween 🎃
My favorite eatery in Paris suggests I get some inexpensive lawyers 😄
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4️⃣0️⃣ To celebrate my 40th birthday today, we’ve added 3 new limited edition gifts — 🎂🗓 🕯
They come from one of my favorite emoji packs — BirthdayCollection 🕯
Enjoy! 🍸
➕ Turning 40 today. Exactly 18 years ago I launched my first large project and grew it from zero to 100,000,000 users 👨🦳
Should I tell you how it happened in another “life stories” post? Feel free to vote in the meaningful poll below 🔽
#lifestories
On the 27th of August 2024, I was still in the police station in Paris. It was my third day there. With no devices or internet access, it felt like an extreme digital detox.
That day I was having my regular hours-long interview with the police. Between the questions, I asked my lawyer if my ❤️ Julia would come for questioning too. He said she was expected to, but couldn’t come. I pressed him on the reasons. “Got scared? Left Paris?”, I asked. He hesitated. “She’s pregnant,” he finally said.
It was not the answer I expected at that moment. I remained calm throughout my time in police custody, but this turn of events caught me off guard. After a pause, I said: “Thank you for the good news”. Other people present — the translator, the clerk, the policeman — produced awkward smiles.
I later learnt that the police didn’t know how to break the news of Julia’s pregnancy to me. The circumstances were not exactly celebratory. Julia was alone in a foreign country she’d never been to before. No one knew when I would be able to talk to her again.
Luckily, I was released late in the evening the next day. As I entered the rooftop terrace of the place Julia was staying at, magnificent fireworks erupted right in front of me. Below, the opening ceremony of the Paralympics had just begun.
But the mood was not festive. I learnt that while I was away, the pressure on Julia had been insane. Some blogger started a rumor that she was a “Mossad agent.” Other people came up with the nonsensical idea that it was her posts (and not my chartered flight details) that had prompted the police to welcome me at the airport.
With her devices confiscated, she couldn’t access her accounts on Telegram and Instagram for weeks. Her going radio silent on social media provoked even more speculation. Cyber-bullying aimed at her kept reaching new highs.
Julia stood strong. But, unlike me, she wasn’t used to hostility. She is not made for war.
Two days ago, she was visiting the doctor who monitored her pregnancy. I was in the middle of my 12-hour work day when Julia sent me “😭😭😭” from the doctor’s office. I instantly knew what was wrong.
🏷 Yesterday we introduced two limited-edition gifts. Both have now sold out. The entire supply of 🍭500,000 lollipops and 🌸100,000 cherry blossoms was gone within hours 😮
⚡️ We didn’t expect that to happen so fast, so we’re now working on an update to better handle sold-out items 👨💻
🛒 Should we introduce more limited-edition gifts? ❓
🔜 While we patiently wait for Google to approve the latest Telegram update, let’s take a break for some nostalgia 👨🦳
❤️ Here’s my eldest daughter instructing me on how to launch Telegram in the summer of 2013. She’s the real brain behind this whole thing, folks ☕️
🔎 Search on Telegram is more powerful than in other messaging apps because it allows users to find public channels and bots. Unfortunately, this feature has been abused by people who violated our Terms of Service to sell illegal goods.
💪 Over the last few weeks, a dedicated team of moderators, leveraging AI, has made Telegram Search much safer. All the problematic content we identified in Search is no longer accessible. If you still manage to find something unsafe or illegal in Telegram Search, please report it to us via @SearchReport.
🚫 To further deter criminals from abusing Telegram Search, we have updated our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, ensuring they are consistent across the world. We’ve made it clear that the IP addresses and phone numbers of those who violate our rules can be disclosed to relevant authorities in response to valid legal requests.
☝️ These measures should discourage criminals. Telegram Search is meant for finding friends and discovering news, not for promoting illegal goods. We won't let bad actors jeopardize the integrity of our platform for almost a billion users.
❤️ Thanks everyone for your support and love!
Last month I got interviewed by police for 4 days after arriving in Paris. I was told I may be personally responsible for other people’s illegal use of Telegram, because the French authorities didn’t receive responses from Telegram.
This was surprising for several reasons:
1. Telegram has an official representative in the EU that accepts and replies to EU requests. Its email address has been publicly available for anyone in the EU who googles “Telegram EU address for law enforcement”.
2. The French authorities had numerous ways to reach me to request assistance. As a French citizen, I was a frequent guest at the French consulate in Dubai. A while ago, when asked, I personally helped them establish a hotline with Telegram to deal with the threat of terrorism in France.
3. If a country is unhappy with an internet service, the established practice is to start a legal action against the service itself. Using laws from the pre-smartphone era to charge a CEO with crimes committed by third parties on the platform he manages is a misguided approach. Building technology is hard enough as it is. No innovator will ever build new tools if they know they can be personally held responsible for potential abuse of those tools.
Establishing the right balance between privacy and security is not easy. You have to reconcile privacy laws with law enforcement requirements, and local laws with EU laws. You have to take into account technological limitations. As a platform, you want your processes to be consistent globally, while also ensuring they are not abused in countries with weak rule of law. We’ve been committed to engaging with regulators to find the right balance. Yes, we stand by our principles: our experience is shaped by our mission to protect our users in authoritarian regimes. But we’ve always been open to dialogue.
Sometimes we can’t agree with a country’s regulator on the right balance between privacy and security. In those cases, we are ready to leave that country. We've done it many times. When Russia demanded we hand over “encryption keys” to enable surveillance, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Russia. When Iran demanded we block channels of peaceful protesters, we refused — and Telegram got banned in Iran. We are prepared to leave markets that aren’t compatible with our principles, because we are not doing this for money. We are driven by the intention to bring good and defend the basic rights of people, particularly in places where these rights are violated.
All of that does not mean Telegram is perfect. Even the fact that authorities could be confused by where to send requests is something that we should improve. But the claims in some media that Telegram is some sort of anarchic paradise are absolutely untrue. We take down millions of harmful posts and channels every day. We publish daily transparency reports (like this or this ). We have direct hotlines with NGOs to process urgent moderation requests faster.
However, we hear voices saying that it’s not enough. Telegram’s abrupt increase in user count to 950M caused growing pains that made it easier for criminals to abuse our platform. That’s why I made it my personal goal to ensure we significantly improve things in this regard. We’ve already started that process internally, and I will share more details on our progress with you very soon.
I hope that the events of August will result in making Telegram — and the social networking industry as a whole — safer and stronger. Thanks again for your love and memes 🙏
🚩 Big day! Today we introduce the Telegram Browser and Mini App Store, plus many other innovations ✨🍬
🖥 The Browser lets users switch between viewing websites and messaging, merging communication with news consumption. It is equipped with all the features you would expect from a browser — like search, bookmarks, and multiple tabs 🤩
💎 Most importantly, Telegram Browser allows people to view decentralized websites called TON Sites. This opens the world of blockchain-based web (often called Web 3.0) to almost a billion users. To try it out, update Telegram and open a link (like tonsite://getting-started.ton) 🌐
⭐️ Users can now gift Stars to their friends, who will be directed to the Mini App Store for examples of apps that accept Stars. To check out the mini app catalog, go to the 'Apps' tab in Search 🔎
🔝 Speaking of mini apps, they have a whole new way to spread virally across the Telegram ecosystem — via Stories, which also got an upgrade today with covers and smart animated weather widgets ☀️
💪 We’re proud to ship this. Try it all yourself or check out the video demos on the blog. Enjoy your summer holidays — we’ll keep building 👨💻
🐱 Despite the fact that I am clearly a dog person, Telegram hosts the largest cat-lover community in the world — Catizen 😼
🐱 Catizen is a mini game on Telegram with over 26 million players. The game has already earned $16 million (!) from in-app purchases and donated 1% of it to rescue stray cats 😱
😄 Catizen introduced millions of people to blockchain, because it uses TON-based smart contracts for its in-game rewards. Their team also built tools for other developers to easily launch their games on Telegram and TON 🤑
👏 Well done, Catizen team — now I’m waiting for you to develop a “Dogizen”! 🐶
🔍 Earlier this month, we launched AI-powered sticker search. We added search tags to all 40,000+ stickers created by Telegram artists over the past 10 years. As a result, the new search supports multiple keywords in 34 languages, helping you find the perfect sticker — or emoji, if you’re a Premium user ⭐️
😏 But this is just the beginning. Next month, the sticker tab will also let you search through millions of popular custom stickers uploaded by our users 😏
💡 Stickers have been one of the many innovations that define Telegram. AI-powered search will make discovering them easier than ever 🔭
🧑💻 Over the past few years, our moderation team has been working tirelessly to keep Telegram safe. Each month they removed about 1 million channels and groups, along with over 10 million users who violated our rules. These impressive results were made possible thanks to your reports, as well as our automated detection systems and AI-powered tools 😵
🤫 However, much of this work remained behind the scenes. The public wasn’t fully aware of the extent of our moderation efforts, and media outlets often relied on outdated information from parts of our website that hadn’t been updated in a decade 🕷
🖥 To address this, we’ve launched a new section on our website: telegram.org/moderation. This page highlights the incredible work our moderators have done over the years and offers a transparent overview of our ongoing commitment to keeping Telegram safe 🧹
🙃 This is the biggest update in the history of Mini Apps: full-screen mode, home screen shortcuts, geolocation, motion tracking, media sharing, document creation, gift sending, subscription tiers, emoji statuses — and much more 😎
🕺 To explore some of these new features, update Telegram and check out these early examples:
Tiny Verse opens in full-screen, which looks great on desktops and tablets. Make sure to swipe and zoom to admire the 3D effects 😊
Playdeck's task section now features an "Add to Home Screen" option — and a flying Yeti that moves based on your device’s orientation 😙
Major has added a custom loading screen and the new Major Maze mini-game, where you can guide a rolling ball by tilting your phone 😎
😏 This is just the beginning — all discovered within the first day of Mini Apps 2.0's launch! 😮
🔜 Telegram is about to introduce 10 new features for Mini Apps, enabling developers to create dozens of new kinds of apps and games on Telegram.
📺 Full-Screen Mode
📱 Home Screen Shortcuts
✍️ Subscription Plans
📍 Geolocation Access (with permissions)
📱 Device Orientation Data
💤 Emoji Status Access
🎨 Media Sharing
🎁 Sending Gifts
💭 Expanded Messaging Limits
💰 Ad Monetization
▶️ The last two items are already live with the remaining features launching within 2-4 weeks. Get your Mini Apps ready! 🚀
😎 If I had to give one piece of advice to people in their 20s who want to build something great, it would be: “Never drink alcohol.” 🍸
🤮 I haven’t drunk alcohol in nearly 20 years, but I’ve seen many successful people ruin themselves with it. Alcohol clouds your mental clarity and intuition for days after consumption. While it might lift your mood temporarily, it’s like taking out a loan — you’ll pay it back with interest. The short-term pleasure brings long-term misery 😵💫
🍔 I know it’s hard not to yield to social pressure: humans have evolved to copy the behaviors of those around them. But the habits of the majority are self-destructive — most people around us drink alcohol, eat fast food, and have passive lifestyles. And that’s fine. If you want to achieve something extraordinary, however, you’ll boost your chances by keeping both your mind and body healthy 😼
🏷 Telegram has launched the most affordable way for businesses to authenticate their customers’ phone numbers — just $0.01 per code, anywhere in the world.
📥 Now businesses can save millions by sending verification codes to their users right through Telegram. This method is much cheaper, faster, and more secure than traditional SMS verification. We call it Telegram Gateway 🔗
💵 Phone number verification is a multibillion-dollar industry. Telegram alone has been spending around $10M per month to authenticate all the users who sign up and log in to our service.
🏅 We’ve made this investment so that others won’t have to. Since we’ve already verified the phone numbers of nearly a billion people, other businesses can avoid high verification costs. And if the phone number they want to verify is not connected to a Telegram account, we won’t charge at all.
🎁 Our prices are unprecedentedly low, so I’m not sure if Telegram Gateway will become a significant revenue source for us. But we hope that this initiative will make the world more efficient, reducing costs and prices for many services worldwide 🤝
#lifestories 🐶
Exactly 18 years ago today, I launched VK—my first large company. Below is the story of how it happened.
I graduated from Saint-Petersburg University in the summer of 2006. I wanted to keep in touch with my former classmates, but I knew it would be hard without a website where everyone could find each other. So, in late August 2006, I set a goal—to build a social network for university students and graduates in four weeks.
I was pretty good at coding. At 12, I built web-based games with vector animations and sound effects. At 13, I was already asked to teach older kids Pascal (a computer language) in summer camps for programmers.
And yet, planning to build a fully-fledged social network in four weeks was overconfident. To make it worse, I decided not to use any ready-made third-party modules. I wanted to create everything from scratch: from profiles and private messages to photo albums and search.
The task seemed too large to grasp. Where do I even start? Back then, my brother Nikolai lived in Germany. Nikolai is a brilliant mathematician and algorithmic programmer, but he’s always considered web development beneath him. At that time, he was focused on his Math thesis at the Max Planck University in Bonn. He refused to help with the code but gave advice: “Write the code for user authorization first,” he said. “You’ll get through.”
This made sense. I started with a login page that generated session IDs. Sessions could then be used to identify users, show them their profile pages, and allow them to edit them. Even the sign-up process could wait: I prepopulated the entries for the first few users manually in the database.
That's when I first understood it clearly: Every complex task is just a combination of many simple ones. If you split a big project into manageable parts and arrange them in the right order, you can get anything done. In theory. In practice, you also encounter all kinds of technical obstacles that test your persistence.
In September 2006, I typically wrote code for 20 hours in a row, had one meal and then slept for 10 hours. After a day of work, I’d boil myself a bucket of pasta and eat it with a generous amount of cheese. No other food was required. I didn’t care whether it was day or night outside. Social connections stopped existing. All that mattered was the code.
I tried to make each section of my project flawless, and that took time. Obsessing over details didn’t help to get everything done in four weeks. But being the only team member allowed me to minimize time spent on internal communication. And since I knew every line of the code base by heart, I could find and fix bugs faster.
On October 10, 2006, I had a beta version of the social network up and running. I called it VKontakte (VK), which means “in contact”. It took me six weeks instead of four to create it. But the result was worth it. Users that I invited from my previous project—a students’ portal I’d been building since 2003—signed up by the thousands and started to invite friends.
I kept adding new features quickly, and competitors struggled to catch up. A few months later, I hired another developer. By that time, VK already had a million members. Within seven years, VK would reach 100 million monthly users. At that point, I was fired by the board of VK, so I left the company to focus fully on Telegram.
That experience of single-handedly building the first version of VK in 2006 was so valuable that it defined my career. As the sole member of the product team, I had to do the work of a front-end developer, back-end developer, UX/UI designer, system administrator, and product manager—all at once. I got to understand the basics of all these jobs. I learned the tiniest details of how a social network works.
I also learned that there are no complex tasks in this world—only many small ones that look scary when combined. Split a big task into smaller parts, organize them in the right sequence—and “you’ll get through”.
🔥 I love the Telegram team. Just yesterday, I suggested 10 improvements to our apps. We had mockups ready the same day, and today, we already have fully functional builds with these features implemented 😳
🆕 These updates include 5 improvements to gifts, 3 to hashtags, the ability to add media to a message after it’s been sent, and the ability to view the time a message was edited 🔜
⚡️ All in just one day. It’s no surprise that the Telegram team has shaped how most messaging apps work today, contributing to nearly every innovation in communication 😒
🫡📊 And here’s another poll.
👵 As I approach my 40th birthday, I realize I have many life stories to tell. Should I start posting them here? 📝
🥳 The holiday season (which includes my birthday 😏) is just around the corner, and today we are launching Gifts!
🎁 Gifts are a great way to congratulate your loved ones on important events. Gift recipients can choose to display them on their profiles or sell them for Stars ⭐
📦 Some gifts are in limited supply. Later this year we’ll introduce the ability to convert these limited-edition gifts into TON-based NFTs. Users will then be able to auction and trade these tokenized gifts outside Telegram, with ownership recorded on the blockchain 🔗
🔜 We also launched other exciting features today, which I’ll cover in a separate post. For now, I’ll let you dive into the gift selection process 🫴🙂
📰 My previous post may have seemed to announce a major shift in how Telegram works. But in reality, little has changed.
🌐 Since 2018, Telegram has been able to disclose IP addresses/phone numbers of criminals to authorities, according to our Privacy Policy in most countries.
⚖️ Whenever we received a properly formed legal request via relevant communication lines, we would verify it and disclose the IP addresses/phone numbers of dangerous criminals. This process had been in place long before last week.
🤖 Our @transparency bot demonstrates exactly that. This bot shows the number of processed requests for user data.
✉️ For example, in Brazil, we disclosed data for 75 legal requests in Q1 (January-March) 2024, 63 in Q2, and 65 in Q3. In India, our largest market, we satisfied 2461 legal requests in Q1, 2151 in Q2, and 2380 in Q3.
📈 In Europe, there was an uptick in the number of valid legal requests we received in Q3. This increase was caused by the fact that more EU authorities started to use the correct communication line for their requests, the one mandated by the EU DSA law. Information about this contact point has been publicly available to anyone who viewed the Telegram website or googled “Telegram EU address for law enforcement” since early 2024.
🤝 To reduce confusion, last week, we streamlined and unified our privacy policy across different countries. But our core principles haven’t changed. We’ve always strived to comply with relevant local laws — as long as they didn’t go against our values of freedom and privacy.
🛡 Telegram was built to protect activists and ordinary people from corrupt governments and corporations — we do not allow criminals to abuse our platform or evade justice.
🎉 Telegram has reached 10 million paid subscribers. 10 million people are now enjoying Telegram Premium!
🆕 Today, we’re introducing new features while phasing out a few outdated ones.
⛔️ We’ve removed the People Nearby feature, which was used by less than 0.1% of Telegram users, but had issues with bots and scammers.
🛍 In its place, we will be launching “Businesses Nearby”, showcasing legitimate, verified businesses. These businesses will be able to display product catalogs and accept payments seamlessly.
✂️ We’ve also disabled new media uploads to Telegraph, our standalone blogging tool, which seems to have been misused by anonymous actors.
☝️ While 99.999% of Telegram users have nothing to do with crime, the 0.001% involved in illicit activities create a bad image for the entire platform, putting the interests of our almost billion users at risk.
✊ That’s why this year we are committed to turn moderation on Telegram from an area of criticism into one of praise.
1️⃣1️⃣ When I turned 11 in 1995, I made a promise to myself to become smarter, stronger and freer every day. Today Telegram turns 11 years old, and it’s ready to make the same commitment. Every day, Telegram should become:
✨ 🧠 smarter (more features for the people)
✨ 💪 stronger (more popularity among users)
✨ ✈️ freer (more independent and self-sufficient)
🎂 Happy birthday, Telegram!
P. S. Just 2 weeks after the last major Telegram update, we’re launching new features today — a new type of channels and 3 new ways to support content creators. Enjoy! 🌅
🤯 I was just told that I have over 100 biological kids. How is this possible for a guy who has never been married and prefers to live alone? 🤨
🔙 Fifteen years ago, a friend of mine approached me with a weird request. He said that he and his wife couldn’t have kids due to a fertility issue and asked me to donate sperm at a clinic for them to have a baby. I laughed my ass off before realizing he was dead serious 😑
👨⚕️ The boss of the clinic told me that “high quality donor material” was in short supply and that it was my civic duty to donate more sperm to anonymously help more couples. This sounded crazy enough to get me to sign up for sperm donation 🚬
🤰Fast forward to 2024, my past donating activity has helped over a hundred couples in 12 countries to have kids. Moreover, many years after I stopped being a donor, at least one IVF clinic still has my frozen sperm available for anonymous use by families who want to have kids 👧
🧬 Now I plan to open-source my DNA so that my biological children can find each other more easily. Of course, there are risks, but I don’t regret having been a donor. The shortage of healthy sperm has become an increasingly serious issue worldwide, and I’m proud that I did my part to help alleviate it 💪
🚀 I also want to help destigmatize the whole notion of sperm donation and incentivize more healthy men to do it, so that families struggling to have kids can enjoy more options. Defy convention — redefine the norm! ✊
👑9️⃣5️⃣0️⃣👑 Telegram reached 950 million monthly active users — up from 900 million in the spring. On track for ONE BILLION! 🎆
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