Telegram CEO and founder Pavel Durov was announced today as the company launches its advertising platform next month, allowing channel owners to receive financial rewards. The company will pay rewards using toncoins on the TON blockchain. Channel owners will start receiving 50% of all revenue the company earns from serving ads on their channels.
Telegram channels allow users to broadcast public messages to a large audience. Durov says that while broadcast channels on Telegram generate a trillion views each month, only 10% of those views are monetized with Telegram ads, its promotion tool. In March, Telegram’s ad platform will open to channel owners in nearly a hundred countries, marking a major shift toward content monetization.
The company told TechCrunch that it is not yet ready to share criteria for revenue sharing.
“To ensure that ad payments and withdrawals are fast and secure, we will exclusively use the TON blockchain,” Durov wrote in his Telegram post. “Similar to our approach with Telegram usernames enabled Fragment, we will sell ads and share revenue with channel owners on Toncoin. This will create a virtuous circle, where content creators can either redeem their Toncoins — or reinvest them in promoting and upgrading their channels.”
The TON token jumped nearly 40% to over $2.92 immediately after the news broke and is at $2.65 at the time of writing.
With this latest announcement, Telegram will join YouTube and X (formerly Twitter), which offer ad revenue sharing with users. YouTube offers a 55% share of ad revenue to creators in the YouTube Partner Program, while X began offering revenue sharing to users in July 2023. Meta is also testing a new payment model for its Ads on Reels monetization program.
Telegram has more than 800 million monthly active users worldwide.
