The CEO and co-founder of Telegram made a statement on monetization last year:* https://t.me/durov/142 https://t.me/durov/142 These parts highlight the strateg

The CEO and co-founder of Telegram made a statement on monetization last year:* https://t.me/durov/142 https://t.me/durov/142 These parts highlight the strategy: > 4. All the features that are currently free will stay free. We will add some new features for business teams or power users. Some of these features will require more resources and will be paid for by these premium users. Regular users will be able to keep enjoying Telegram – for free, forever. > 5. All parts of Telegram devoted to messaging will remain ad-free. We think that displaying ads in private 1-to-1 chats or group chats is a bad idea. Communication between people should be free of advertising of any sort. > 6. In addition to its messaging component, Telegram has a social networking dimension. Our massive public one-to-many channels can have millions of subscribers each and are more like Twitter feeds. In many markets the owners of such channels display ads to earn money, sometimes using third-party ad platforms. The ads they post look like regular messages, and are often intrusive. We will fix this by introducing our own Ad Platform for public one-to-many channels – one that is user-friendly, respects privacy and allows us to cover the costs of servers and traffic. If you accept the co-founder's statement, Telegram is only going to monetize one-to-many communications, and not charge fees for one-to-one conversations (in contrast to WhatsApp). Telegram is privately held, not publicly traded, and has no obligation to prioritize profit maximization over their mission. * The statement is linked from their FAQ: https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-out-of-this https://telegram.org/faq#q-how-are-you-going-to-make-money-o...