After years of no success, Telegram has just found the path to profitability. Enough to make Pavel Durov, its CEO and founder, who gave more details on this subject on the social network X. Let’s take stock.
Very encouraging figures
The manager therefore confirmed the good news: “As I predicted, 2024 turned out to be a very good year for Telegram. For the first time in three years of monetization, Telegram has become profitable ».
He said Telegram issued approximately $2 billion in debt to finance these activities and that a significant portion of it was repaid this fall. “taking advantage of favorable Telegram bond prices”. This allows the company to end the year with $500 million in cash reserves, not counting the cryptoassets it holds.
This good news was made possible thanks to the success of the Premium subscription offered by Telegram at 5 euros per month. The number of customers has tripled this year to reach 12 million out of around 950 million active users, specifies The Echoes.
Note also that Telegram has 50 full-time employees and was financed mainly through the equity of its CEO Pavel Durov. Managing to generate new sources of income had become essential for this messaging company if it wanted to survive in the long term.
Telegram responds to criticism
As a reminder, Telegram’s year was quite turbulent after the arrest of its CEO, Pavel Durov in France. French justice accuses him of allowing criminal activities to flourish on the service without doing enough in terms of moderation and cooperation with the authorities. Since its release, vigilance over illegal content appears to have increased considerably on the service. To find out more about this, you can re-read our previous article here.
For the rest, the application has also been accused of maintaining disinformation networks on a global scale. Here again, Telegram intends to show its credentials in the fight against fake news. Quoted by BloombergDevon Spurgeon, spokesperson for Telegram, underlines:
We do this by providing users with only the content they subscribe to and providing a verification system to help users identify official channels. We also don’t use algorithms that favor sensational content.
